The History of Sex in Cinema

Part Eleven

Sex Stars of the Forties

Throughout the Forties, while most of the world's population was preoccupied with total war and its devastating aftermath, the most popular star of Hollywood's movies was a blondined dream girl of rather everyday prettiness named Betty Grable. Today it is a bit difficult to comprehend her popularity, if only because Hollywood's musical films no longer flourish; but at on point in the decade, the production of such pastiches amounted to more than a third of the studios' total output. Thus, to understand Miss Grable's pre-eminence over other more glamorous and alluring bundles of femininity, one must also be aware of the national preference for what would strike us now as somewhat insipid musical entertainments. No less important, during the War itself leggy pinups of Betty adorned the bunks and barracks of vast numbers of our fighters for a more democratic world. In an odd way, she was a suitable representative of democracy. There was nothing aristocratic about her except her earnings. She was shrewd and ambitious, but hardly cultivated; chirpy and bright, but hardly brainy. More recent writers, in assessing her appeal, have claimed that she possessed about as much mystery as a waitress in an Iowa diner.

The above verdict, although not calculated to start a stampede toward the tall-corn state, nevertheless sums up the basic appeal not only of Betty but of many of the substitute love objects of the early Forties. To the millions of men in camps and combat zones, this girl-next-door ordinariness seemed somehow more real, more desirable, more attainable than those diaphanous darlings of their peacetime yearnings. The fashions of the time furthered this desexualization of daydreams. A boxy look in the shoulders made most girls look like members of a football squad, despite the challenging thrust of the breasts; and the various Service uniforms they often wore seemed to emphasize the fact that sex was for spare moments only, that military aims rather than passions must be satisfied first.

During this period, as we shall see, Ann Sheridan, Carole Landis and Marie McDonald--"The Oomph Girl," "The Ping Girl" and "The Body," respectively--came and went; and though they had all the sexual attributes that any girl might need or want, they existed primarily for show, like goodies temptingly laid out in a shopwindow. They could be looked at but not touched.

So it was with Betty Grable, who, despite her aura of a girl who had been around, remained unconquerable in the clinches until wedding bells were included in the proposition. In fact, so remarkably pure and chaste was she that the plot ploy of one picture had her walking out on the eve of her wedding simply on the suspicion that her fiancé was marrying her solely for her abilities as an entertainer. About Betty, one film reviewer of the period said that she was a vision "of the little girl next door turned vaudevillian."

This vision, as it happened, was very near the truth. Born in 1916, the daughter of a St. Louis stockbroker and a stage-struck mother, Betty was an infant prodigy of the then-familiar type who did imitations of Al Jolson, tap-danced and tooted on the saxophone. By the time she was 7, she was dispensing these talents via radio; at 13, she was hustled by her mother to Hollywood and enrolled in two dancing academies and one dramatic school. At 14, a well-developed nymphet, she was singing with a jazz band. At 15, she was given a contract by RKO and put in the chorus of a musical, Let's Go Places, then sent packing when it was discovered that California child-labor laws had been flouted by her employment. Soon after, however, she became the first chorine selected as a Goldwyn Girl for Whoopee, and for the remainder of the Thirties she shuttled from studio to studio as a perennial starlet. She was then regarded as just another cute blonde, suitable mainly for campus musicals--one solo chorus and some chaste spooning with the movie's halfback hero. For promotional purposes, during this period, however, she energetically posed for more leg art than any other actress, with the result that college dormitories across the land were soon abloom with her likeness. For this reason more than any other, by the end of the Thirties, she had become familiar as the pulchritudinous possessor of "the million-dollar legs."

Despairing of ever making it big in Hollywood--on screen, at any rate--Betty took to the vaudeville circuits in 1939, terming the expedition a "personal-appearance tour," and making sure that her photogenic legs were a prominent feature of every appearance, on stage or off. Wherever she went, the local papers were delighted to reproduce her shapely image--so much so that one morning, the story goes, Darryl Zanuck of 20th Century-Fox picked up his newspaper, saw a picture of Betty and promptly signed her for his company. Almost at the same time, she was tapped by director Buddy de Sylva for a role in Cole Porter's stage musical Du Barry Was a Lady. Zanuck, having no immediate plans for the girl, generously allowed her a Broadway stint of eight months, during which time she landed on the cover of Life (December 1939). She returned to Hollywood just as the Forties began, replacing that other favorite Zanuck blonde, Alice Faye, opposite Don Ameche in Down Argentine Way. Alice, it seems, felt that she had been teamed with Ameche just a little too often. Betty made a hit in her stead.

Shortly thereafter, Zanuck co-starred the two blondes in Tin Pan Alley, and the critics everywhere discovered that both Betty's talents and her legs were the superior. Time's anonymous reviewer virtually drooled: "She gyrated through a harem scene," he wrote, "clad brilliantly in sequined bra and panties, her legs shining and sinaous beneath transparent pantaloons." Since the plots of the movies in which she cavorted were seldom more than pat little love triangles, critics rarely bothered to detail them. But notice was invariably taken of Betty. Noting the "mean and snaky wiggle" she put into her dancing in Coney Island (1943), the same reviewer wrote, "When Miss Grable agitates her torso, in a Technicolored pink jacket and short mauve skirt, it is not an exhibition which is likely to lull you to sleep." Technicolor and Betty Grable were made for each other, and seldom during the Forties did a year go by without at least two Grable musicals to lighten and enliven it.

It was not, however, the 20-odd musicals she made for Fox that have secured for her a place in film history so much as the pinup photographs for which she continued to pose so assiduously. Film critic William K. Zinsser once described the most famous of these while fondly recalling his War experiences for the New York Herald Tribune. "The picture was a symphony of curves," he wrote. "Miss Grable had been squeezed, perhaps sewn, into a white bathing suit that was providentially one size too small, and she was peeking saucily over her shoulder. This shining product of our way of life was displayed at outposts all over the world." Indeed it was. An estimated 2,000,000 Servicemen wrote to the studio requesting a personal copy of the famed still. Throughout the War years, Fox stocked Grable prints, in various delectable poses, in five appropriate sizes, ranging from the small, "over-the-heart" size to a monster print suitable for posting in lockers, barracks and similar semiprivate places. Betty was always proud of what she considered her role in the War effort, and declared herself to be "strictly an enlisted man's girl."

Very few enlisted men, however, could have afforded her upkeep. By 1948 the Treasury Department announced that Betty was the highest-salaried woman in the world. Besides, she was married to trumpeter Harry James, then at the zenith of his career. Previously, during the Thirties, she had been briefly married to the former child film star Jackie Coogan, after which she was frequently seen with screen villain George Raft. It was Raft who, one day, to please Betty, delivered to her doorstep a race horse tied up in ribbons. Rumor was rife that they would marry, but soon her name was being linked with bandleader Artie Shaw, then just on the verge of his remarkable marital career. When suddenly he eloped with Lana Turner, Betty remarked a bit plaintively, "It must have come on him very suddenly."

Although the winsome Miss Grable aged prettily, the time came when she was no longer America's favorite blonde. This did not occur, however, until the Fifties were well under way; and Betty was more than gracious when it became apparent to her that the studio was grooming Marilyn Monroe for her favored place in the starry firmament. When the two met preparatory to appearing in a film together, Betty told her, "Relax, Marilyn. I've got mine. Go get yours." This sage advice, to judge by subsequent events in Hollywood, was certainly well taken.

• • •

If Betty Grable was the GI-deal of the girl next door, the more opulently endowed Rita Hayworth embodied another image entirely. Some psychologists like to claim that the attraction of Miss Hayworth's breasts, always covered but never concealed, represented a kind of wartime mother fixation; but relatively few of our nation's fighting men pinned up pictures of their mother in their barracks. For most GIs, if it wasn't Grable, it was Hayworth--and sometimes both. Like Betty Grable, la Hayworth had been seen in movies of the Thirties to distressingly little effect, then suddenly blossomed forth in the Forties. By 1947, as Winthrop Sargeant, a writer for Life, apostrophized her, she had become "a red-haired girl whose undulant figure and speculative smile were becoming as familiar to Americans as those of the madonna were to the Italians of the Renaissance." Life itself added considerably to that familiarity by placing her likeness on its well-circulated cover a total of four times--a record, it might be mentioned, equaled only by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It was a Life photographer who snapped the picture that became the second-most-wanted pinup of World War Two, after the aforementioned study of Betty Grable. It showed Rita kneeling in bed and wearing an exceedingly sheer nightgown. So inviting did she appear that American males, in and out of the Armed Forces, wrote her an average of 6000 letters a week during the War years. And when, in 1946, the most destructive atomic bomb yet contrived was tested at Bikini atoll, it had Rita's picture symbolically pasted to its war head.

By then she was 28 years old, of which 14 had already been spent in show business. Born in 1918, and named Margarita Carmen Cansino, little Rita was raised in Jackson Heights, New York, until her father, who led a troupe called The Dancing Cansinos, drafted her into the act. "All of a sudden," as Cansino later explained it to a reporter, "I wake up. Jesus! She has a figure! She ain't no baby anymore!" For the next three years she traveled the night-club and vaudeville circuits, until eventually she reached Tijuana, where a Fox executive, Winfield Sheehan, noticed exactly what her father had noticed. Sheehan at once gave her a small dancing role in a film called Dante's Inferno; but his larger plans for her came to nought when Fox merged with 20th Century and Darryl F. Zanuck emerged as studio top dog. With sheehan out in the cold, Zanuck cast Loretta Young for the title role in Ramona, the part that was supposed to have launched Rita on the road to stardom.

Rita's next fateful meeting was with Eddie, Judson, a middle-aged ex-gambler of fatherly appearance who held the Hollywood franchise for the deluxe Isotta-Fraschini line of automobiles. He married the teenaged dancer and took her career in hand, deciding as a first step that she must change her name. For a time she used Haworth, her mother's family name; but this became Hayworth after Judson succeeded in convincing the autocratic head of Columbia Pictures, Harry Cohn, that his young wife had star potential. The studio wrought other changes: Her black hair was transformed to the strawberry-blonde shade with which she eventually became identified, and her hairline was actually shaved back to give her a more elevated and noble brow. Rita was ready.

The tide began to turn in 1941, when Warner Bros.' "Oomph Girl," Ann Sheridan, struck for higher wages; Warners thriftily borrowed Rita Hayworth for The Strawberry Blonde, co-starring her with James Cagney and Olivia de Havilland--mainly, it must be admitted, because she had the same Oomphatic measurements as Miss Sheridan, for whom some costly turn-of-the-century costumes had already been created. Rita received such good notices that she was at once borrowed again, this time by Zanuck. Carole Landis, then being hailed as a new blonde bombshell, had refused to dye her hair red to play the seductive Spanish hussy in the forthcoming Blood and Sand. Rita's hair, however, was already dyed red--and her work in the film skyrocketed her career. Harry Cohn, no mean star maker, realizing that he had what in the trade is known as a "hot property," quickly tossed Rita into two musicals, with no less a dancing partner than Fred Astaire. By the end of 1942, her seductive features had adorned the covers of 23 magazines and, as a kind of official recognition, Louella Parsons named her "The Girl of the Year."

By this time, husband Eddie Judson was out, and Rita was being squired around town by tycoon Howard Hughes, by the original "beefcake" boy, Victor Mature, by singer Tony Martin, and by the suave British actor David Niven. It was hardly for neglect that she sued Judson for divorce, but for his business habits; she claimed that "he regarded me as an investment." She won her suit, and Harry Cohn was said to have generously provided Judson with a $10,000 dividend on his "investment." Even more generously, Cohn forthwith lavished several million dollars on a stunning Jerome Kern musical called Cover Girl, with Gene Kelly cavorting as Rita's dancing partner. It remains one of her best pictures. Meanwhile, in her so-called private life, Rita had met Orson Welles, Hollywood's erratic Wunderkind, after his controversial Citizen Kane, and they were married in 1943, a union, as someone termed it, of "the beauty and the brain." After two volatile years, and the birth of one daughter, Rita and Orson separated; their divorce was made final in 1947.

A Hayworth cult, which lingers to this day, began to spread after the release of the palpitating, melodramatic Gilda in 1946, starring Rita as the languorous pawn in a love-hate triangle that included her lover (Glenn Ford) and her husband (Georgee Macready). Ado Kyrou, the French author of a bulky study entitled Amour-Erotisme et Cinéma, regarded Rita as the ultimate pinup of the period, although not himself a member of her cult. For him, Rita is less symbolic than symptomatic, and shares the traits of such sister pinup queens as Betty Grable and Veronica Lake. "The pinup," he wrote, "is big, fleshy, beautiful in a stereotyped way, provocative but a look-alike. She is the opposite of the sophisticated woman; in her presence man has no problems, because she conceals no mystery. She is a head and a body, she never stops smiling, she is perfectly wholesome, desperately blockheaded." Kyrou regards this pinup type as "a triumphant apparition" who had, unfortunately, eclipsed the ingénues and dethroned the vamps.

Orson Welles apparently regarded his former wife as neither goddess nor pinup. While their divorce was still being processed, he starred her as a lethalminded sex queen in Lady from Shanghai; and at the film's finale, he had her shot to death by her husband in a bizarre amusement park's mirror maze. Welles also insisted that she cut her hair short for the picture and dye it blonde. Harry Cohn, whose Columbia studio underwrote Lady from Shanghai, wailed over the desecration. "Everybody knows," he cried, "that the most beautiful thing about Rita was her hair."

After the film and the divorce had both been completed, Rita sailed for Europe, and while in Paris, came down with bronchitis. It proveid a fateful illness, for she left the City of Light to take up residence in a villa on the Riviera, where society arbiter Elsa Maxwell was currently holding sway. Elsa introduced Rita to Aly Khan, the world's richest playboy, who was soon saying his new love was "like Venus, only with a soul and sweetness." The newshounds took full notice when Rita followed Aly to Spain, and even more when Aly followed Rita to Hollywood, where she next made The Loves of Carmen. There were mutterings of disapprobation at women's-club meetings when Rita, after finishing the film, sailed for Europe in the company of Aly and her small daughter. But the final straw came when the two took up residence in Switzerland and were joined there by Aly's two sons by his first marriage (which was, incidentally, still in effect). The General Federation of Women's Clubs, totally outraged by this blithe disregard for convention, passed a resolution to boycott Rita's films.

Their wrath was somewhat appeased when Aly's divorce came through and he and Rita were married in a French civil ceremony, Rita renouncing her Catholicism and turning Moslem for the occasion. She also stated that she was through with the movies, since her image had become almost a sacred thing to Aly's Moslem followers. But it wasn't long before she had tired of this form of spirituality, not to mention the tours and protocol that her husband's position demanded. After giving birth to a Moslem girl, Yasmin, she left Switzerland--and Aly--for the United States, where, in a few more pictures, the public showed a willingness to gaze upon the Moslem princess. She separated from Aly in 1951, was divorced soon after, and was reputed to have obtained a $3,000,000 settlement from him. By the early 1950s the Hayworth vogue was all but over, although Miss Sadie Thompson, released in 1953, included one feverish scene that raised a good many sophisticated eyebrows. Rita, as Sadie, the only woman in a tropical bar filled with sweating Marines, belted out The Heat Is On. While she did an orgiastic dance, they surrounded her, shaking their beer bottles to the rhythm until they foamed over like vast ejaculations. This is probably the only occasion that Blatz beer has ever been used as an erotic symbol in the cinema or anywhere else.

Rita was once asked, after being called America's love goddess, what it was like to be so regarded by millions of fans. "Golly," she replied after some reflection, "I guess any girl would love to be a goddess."

• • •

Third in the wartime pinup parade was the torrid, top-heavy Jane Russell--and this was all the more remarkable because, until 1946, very few people had even seen her on the screen. The first of the movies' mammarian prodigies, she made her debut in Howard Hughes' The Outlaw--which, although completed in 1943, promptly encountered censor difficulties that Hughes had no time to straighten out until after the War was over. Meanwhile, however, through the tireless efforts of veteran press agent Russell Birdwell, Jane's sultry face and astonishing figure were made familiar through frequent exposure in the masscirculation magazines. The fact that in such "art" she was invariably posed in revealing, low-cut blouses undoubtedly swayed many editors to choose her brand of cheesecake over that offered by better-known but less provocative young actresses. Actually, it was a photo of her face, not her figure, that piqued Hughes' interest while he was searching for an unknown to play the lead in his forthcoming Western epic. Jane, a dental assistant at the time, had done some photographic modeling on the side, and a few of the results were brought to Hughes' attention. He saw enough in the face to ask her to come in; and he saw enough else, after he had screen-tested her, to sign the girl to a seven-year contract, slating her for the role of Rio in The Outlaw.

But long before that first appearance--the filming was marked by several delays and battles with the Production Code Administration (see Part IX of this series, in the August 1966 Playboy--Jane began to get the Birdwell build-up. "I christened boats," she later recalled. "I judged baby contests, and I sprawled on the beach for photographers, always in the blouse with the low-cut neck." As to the frequent exposure of her own special build-up--38 inches--she implied that the photographic fraternity had taken unfair advantage of her innocence. Still under 20 at the time, she said, "I wasn't used to people who worked angles all the time. They were smiling sweetly and kibitzing. When they asked me to bend over and pick up two pails of water, I bent over and picked up the pails. They must have taken a thousand shots before I realized." Even after she realized, however, variants on the pailpicking obviously continued, for Birdwell managed to flood the country with portraits of Jane that laid maximum emphasis upon the alpine contours of her upper torso. But if, as a result of his ministration, Jane Russell suddenly became big, it is also true that bosoms in general got bigger--in a cinematic sense, at least. To quote Murray Schumach, author of The Face on the Cutting Room Floor, "Jane Russell's breasts were to Hollywood what Eve's apple was to sin."

Meanwhile, Jane remained a sex star without a movie. Hughes, holding onto her contract, refused to allow her to make another film until he was certain (continued on page 164) Sex In Cinema (continued form page 160) that he was going to win his various censorship battles over The Outlaw. During the War, she married the pro-football player Bob Waterfield, and when the star quarterback of the Los Angeles Rams was inducted into the Army, she followed him to Fort Benning, Georgia. To while away the time, she worked in a beauty parlor in nearby Columbus, using her married name, and helped in the local war-bond drives. Perhaps more helpful to morale and the War effort, however, were her popular and omnipresent pinups. Her lush figure and sensual face, with the lustrous dark hair hanging heavily to one side, adorned the fuselages of literally hundreds of bombing planes. Men seemed to respond spontaneously to the challenge in her dark eyes and pouting lips. About her predominant expression, Jane was later to explain to an interviewer, "I was a whiny, disagreeable kid and I got that look--they call it sultry because it sounds glamorous."

With the War over and The Outlaw in general release, the Russell career began to soar again--largely because wherever one looked, Hughes had her picture plastered on the billboards of the nation in an advertising campaign unprecedented for aggressively bad taste. "What Are the Two Great Reasons for Jane Russell's Rise to Stardom?" was a typical poster slogan--and the picture that accompanied it left little room for a second guess. Once more the film ran afoul of the censors, this time specifically because of the boldness of the ads; but Hughes, undaunted, rented theaters on his own to bring his picture to a panting populace and used every resource at his command to keep it running. The censorial hue and cry undoubtedly helped. When a Baltimore judge, upholding a local ban on the film, opined that "Jane Russell's breasts hung over the picture like a thunderstorm spread over a landscape," he was hardly discouraging potential patrons. As one Los Angeles newspaper reported about the lines forming at the box office, "What packed them in was an opportunity for anatomical research."

Their anatomical researches were furthered when Hughes lent her out for an inconsequential quickie called The Young Widow, in which she was required to do little more than lounge about in various black negligees. She fared better as a comedic Calamity Jane opposite Bob Hope in The Paleface; she seemed to enjoy spoofing her own image, meanwhile filling her frontier costumes to abundant advantage. Early in the Fifties she joined another rising sex queen, Marilyn Monroe, in a musical version of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes--and spoofed another image when, toward the end of the film, she proffered a hilarious parody of Marilyn's walk and speech patterns. Then, once more under the aegis of the rambunctious Mr. Hughes, she provoked the Legion of Decency all over again with he costumes and dancing in The French Line. The Legion was particularly unhappy over an abbreviated black-satin outfit that had three large holes in the midriff section, and even more so because she proceeded to perform a bump-and-grind routine that included both side bumps and a front bump. The Production Code Administration also took offense; its rather finicky regulations permitted side bumps or front bumps, but not the two together. When the film was refused a Seal because of this, Miss Russell sided with the official viewpoint, allowing that the scene was, indeed, in poor taste. She insisted, also that she had toned down her performance in the offending number, and that it had come out as it did only because the low camera angle placed undue emphasis on the pelvic region and its movements. Thus, in the twilight of her film career, Miss Russell was suddenly found, ironically, supporting the censors.

Or perhaps it was not so ironic. Actually, despite her on-screen impersonations, Jane Russell was and is deeply religious and contributed handsomely to the construction of The Chapel of the Valley in Los Angeles. ("I think God is a living doll," she once averred.) She has actively promoted such causes as the Women's Adoption International Fund, better known as WAIF, and adopted three children herself. An avid Bible reader, she is an equally avid peruser of comic books, and on occasion betrays this proclivity. Once when a Senator asked for her autograph, she agreed, then looked up, knitting her brow, to ask, "Say, tell me how to spell Senator." But none of these are the endowments for which she will be remembered. At the start of her career, Russell Birdwell had seen to it that she was voted the outstanding sweater girl of 1941. By the time she was named Miss Torpedo of 1949, it was an accolade that she had won completely on her own.

• • •

What Birdwell did for Russell was approximated by other, more anonymous publicity people for girls like Ann Sheridan, Carole Landis and Marie McDonald, all of whom shared Jane's attributes, if not her popularity. Appellations like "Oomph Girl," "Ping Girl" and "The Body" did not spring spontaneously from their audiences' subconscious: they were assiduously fed and fostered by reams of copy and stacks of still emanating from their studios' publicity offices. It just so happened that all three possessed what great sections of the populace--especially those in uniform--wanted at the moment; and their likenesses adorned innumerable GI barracks during the War years. It was Walter Winchell who inadvertently provided Miss Sheridan with her great boost to glory when, toward the end of 1939, he wrote in his syndicated column that she had "umph." An alert press agent at Warners, the sutdio that had her under contract, changed the spelling of that somewhat ungraceful term to "oomph." More than that, he claimed that the actress had ben elected by national acclaim "The Oomph Girl" of the movies. Wire services took widespread note.

Born Clara Lou Sheridan in 1915, Ann was a likable Texas girl who had come to Hollywood in 1933 as the winner of a "Search for Beauty" contest held by Paramount, and for several years thereafter was seen in movies mainly as an attractive part of the background. She had advanced to supporting roles by the time Winchell noticed her; only then, with the studio plugging hard, did the demand for her stills begin to grow. These tended to focus on her head of rich red hair, either piled up high or spilling down over her shoulders, but invariably combined with a sexy, slumbrous expression in her large, heavy-lidded eyes. Her parts grew larger, but not large enough to suit Miss Sheridan. "The publicity they were giving me," she stated many years later, "all that 'Oomph Girl' build-up, got to be a dreadful bore. I resented it because they never backed it up with any roles. One day Paul Muni overheard all my beefing. 'Don't be silly,' he said. 'Use it to fight for the parts you want.' So I started fighting, screaming and clawing with the front office to give me an A picture."

Warners capitulated by giving her a lead role in King's Row--the Peyton Place of its day--and a salary of $2000 a week. Ann won plaudits as the poor, available girl from the wrong side of the tracks who is thrown over by the town rake after their affair. Her scene at the young man's bedside after he has undergone a leg amputation invariably wrung tears from the audience. King's Row also gave an invaluable boost to the career of Ronald Reagan, playing a rich man's son whose father's indulgence encouraged him to become the local heartbreaker. Reagan was generally seen thereafter in more wholesome and cleancut roles; and his original leftward political leanings shifted, too--so much so that in 1966 he became a right-wing Republican candidate for governor of California. As for Miss Sheridan, during the Forties she gradually abandoned her earlier image of "everybody's pal"--trading wisecracks and insults with the likes of Jimmy Cagney, Humphrey Bogart and Pat O'Brien--for more emotional and dramatic roles. Nowadays, her long list of pre-1948 pictures turns up with impressive regularity on late-night television, while Ann herself is the star of a popular daytime TV soap-opera series. Sic transit gloria mundi.

• • •

The precise origins of Carole Landis' "Ping" appellation are less well documented than Ann Sheridan's "Oomph," but undoubtedly it, too, germinated in the recesses of some press agent's fertile mind. (It has been suggested that "ping" is the sound a button would make as it popped off one of Miss Landis' wellfilled blouses or sweaters.) Like Jane Russell, she was always more popular during the War years as a pinup than as a star--although, to be sure, she worked a good deal more than Miss Russell. Born Frances Ridste in 1919 in the small Wisconsin town of Fairchild, the moviestruck girl arrived in Hollywood in 1937. Blonde, beautiful and bountifully formed she moved quickly from extra bits to small parts, including a stint in a Republic serial. Stardom came in 1940, when she played the pelted mate to cave man Victor Mature in Hal Roach's One Million B.C. She was kept busily employed after that, in such secondary Hollywood efforts as Turnabout, Dance Hall Cadet Girl and Orchestra Wives. She duly recorded her tour of Servicemen's installations in North Africa during the War for posterity, both as a book and as a film, in Four Jills in a Jeep. But somehow, for all her loyal fans, Carole was never able to break through to the top echelons of her profession. Despite the dozens of movies that she made, not one could be considered a prestige production. Her career was in obvious decline by July 5, 1948, the date on which her name suddenly made the headlines; they stated that she had died from an overdose of sleeping pills.

Almost as hectic as her screen career was her marital record--five marriages, four divorces and one separation (the last from theatrical producer W. Horace Schmidlapp). On the above-mentioned fifth of July, Rex Harrison--often referred to, even then, as "Sexy Rexy"--discovered Carole's body as it lay on the floor of the bathroom of her Pacific Palisades home, her head resting against her jewel box. Investigation quickly revealed that the two dined together at her home the night before, and that after he left, Carole had consumed large quantities of Seconal pills. What added to the mystery was the maid's statement that he had telephoned the next morning and suggested to her that she not waken her mistress. The maid further informed the police that for the past few weeks Harrison had been in the habit of lunching and dining regularly with Carole. Her despondency, it was quickly established, was mainly due to two things: worry over her deteriorating career and Harrison's refusal to marry her--an understandable one, since he was already married, to the beautiful European film star Lille Palmer. Miss Palmer showed herself to be made of starling stuff when she rushed from New York to be at her husband's side during the resultant ugly publicity to which the actor was subjected; Schmidlapp, on the other hand, expressed shock over the death of his estranged wife but refused to make the trip from New York to Los Angeles. Harrison left Hollywood shortly thereafter, not to return for several years.

If the inspiration for Carole Landis' "Ping" was obscure, there was no doubt whatsoever about Marie McDonald's "Body." A Powers model before she began her screen career in 1941, her lush curves and photogenic features made her an immediate pinup favorite. Indeed, so well proportioned was her famous figure that she never deigned to wear a girdle. Like many of the wartime pinups, however, her career was over almost before it began. Born Marie Frye in Kentucky in 1924, the daughter of a former Ziegfeld girl, she had hawked cigarettes in a New York night club, did some modeling, appeared on Broadway in George White's Scandals and sang with Tommy Dorsey's band before being noticed by a Hollywood talent scout and signed for pictures. From then on, her career seemed dominated more by sordid scandal than by cinematic achievement. Married for a time to Vic Orsatti, a prominent actors' agent, she won a few good roles, the best when she played opposite Gene Kelly in Living in a Big Way (1947). But its title held the key to her problems. After divorcing Orsatti, she married millionaire shoe manufacturer Harry Karl (who later graduated to Debbie Reynolds); and from then on, her name was intermittently in the news as the victim, so she claimed--seldom with substantive proof-- of assorted assaults and rapes. In October 1965, a haggard shell of her former splendid self, she, too, took the sleepingpill route to oblivion.

• • •

Lana Turner, with her pert young face and provocative body, was also a popular wartime pinup. But she was something more; she was a star, a love goddess, a reigning queen--and she did nothing, on screen or off, that did not further that reputation. Lana's story-book discovery at a Hollywood soda fountain has already been remarked upon, and her already been remarked upon, and her emergence as the nation's number-one "sweater girl" as well. In February 1940, she reached her 19th birthday and, while not yet an important star, was nevertheless being frequently mentioned in gossip columns as "the queen of the Hollywood night clubs." During her sorties into these establishments, she was invariably accompanied by such newsworthy escorts as Tommy Dorsey, Howard Hughes, Gene Krupa, Wayne Morris, Victor Mature and Turhan Bey. In February of 1940, she also became engaged to Greg Bautzer, a prominent Los Angeles lawyer and handsome bachelor around town. On her birthday night, however, Bautzer failed to keep a date with Lana, pleading a stomach-ache. That same evening, sorely miffed, Lana accepted a first date with bandleader Artie Shaw, with whom she had recently appeared in Dancing co-Ed. shaw that evening was supposed to be seeing Betty Grable; instead, the two raced straight for Las Vegas and got married, Lana hastily remembering to tuck Bautzer's engagement ring into her handbag during the ceremony. Afterward, she wired her mother: "Got married in Las Vegas. Love. Lana." Lana's mother, naturally assuming that her daughter had married Bautzer, put through a phone call to his residence, but was informed that the damned stomach-ache had prevented him from keeping his rendezvous with his flighty fiancée.

Lana's film career almost ended right then and there. MGM, the studio that held her contract, was outraged by her failure to consult its publicity department before marrying, and an order went to that department to hold off on any further efforts in her behalf. The national press, however, was more than happy to fill in. Lana Turner, after all, was news. Grudgingly, MGM made peace with her. But things were far from peaceful in the Shaw-Turner hilltop ménage. In an article in Woman's Home Companion in 1951, Lana admitted the charge but complained about the remedy. He gave her big, thick books to read when she would rather have been dancing. He kept quoting Nietzsche to her and would make belittling remarks when she admitted her mystification. "I was rather pleased," she said smugly, "to discover the Herr Nietzsche actually went crazy." Shaw was no less wore red, he saw red. Lipstick and high heels were also forbidden potato pancakes in applesauce as vulgar, and made no secret of it. Undaunted, she ironed Artie's shirts, but "when I did, they were thrown back at me." Subsequently, Lana bitterly referred to the marriage as "my college education." Wearied to ehaustion, she retired to a Santa Monica hospital and had, as she put it, "a whopping nervous breakdown." Typically enough of Hollywood's marriage-go-round, it was her former fiancé, Greg Bautzer, who arranged the details of the ensuing divorce.

Her rise to the top was rapid thereafter. While her role in MGM's lavish Ziegfeld Girl (1941) was relatively brief, Lana's appearance drew a critical bouquet from The New York Times, Which termed her "breath-taking...perilously lovely," and went on to applaud her "surprisingly solid performance as the little girl from Brooklyn." (Throughout her long career, the critics have continued to rediscover from time to time the fact that Lana, the the doll-faced glamor queen, is an actress of considerable emotional depth--and each time they seem to be thrown anew by this discovery.) She became a full-fledged Metro star with Honky Tonk (also 1941), in which, for the first of many times, she was teamed with the vaunted Clark Gable. Gable played the gambling man in a 19th Century Western town; Lana, the prim little miss from Boston who eventually wins him away from the saloon's bawdy dancing girls. To demonstrate to her new husband that she is every lovely inch their equal, she parades up and down for him in black-lace underwear. Both Gable and the audience were all eyes and, to quote the Times again, she revealed that she was "not only beautifully but ruggedly constructed." Not long after this, MGM issued a photo of Lana loosely robed in ostrich feathers; if we can accept the studio's figure, a million Servicemen wrote in for copies.

Despite the escalation of her career, Lana was still lonely for love--difficult as this might be to imagine. To fill the bill, she chose a Los Angeles businessman named Stephen Crane. True to the Turner pattern, they married in haste and regretted it almost as quickly; Crane's divorce from a previous wife, they soon discovered, was not legally valid. The marriage was annulled in order to avoid bigamy charges, and it might have stayed that way had Lana not become pregnant in the meantime. When Crane's divorce became official, they remarried, mainly for the sake of the baby, Cheryl. Cheryl herself was to achieve a certain notoriety in subsequent years, but that story belongs later in this history. Lana won her divorce from Crane in 1944, when she was but 23 years old. An account of the proceedings in the not-always-reliable Confidential magazine, which plagued a host of film stars during the Fifties, claimed that, in fact, Crane wanted to bring divorce action against Lana but was talked out of it by MGM. According to Confidential, Crane was irked by his wife's attendance at an interracial party and by her attentions to Negro singer Billy Daniels. In any case, after the divorce, Lana was rumored to be altar-bound, first with Tyrone Power, then with Fernando Lamas; But she actually tied the knot with millionaire sportsman Bob Topping. "This is forever," she stage-whispered for all to hear on the day of her wedding. forever turned out to be approximately four and a half year.

Lana changed her hair coloring almost as often as she changed her men, going from brown (her natural color) to blonde, to brown again, to red and, in The Postman Always Rings Twice, to a bleached near-white, the shade she has since preferred. In that film she once again impressed the critics with her acting, particularly in her passionate love scenes with John Garfield, the ill-fated young man she seduces into murdering her morose and again husband. In Postman, as in many of her films that were to follow, Lana was the quintessential sex object, the woman who was to be had at any cost. Not infrequently, the hot flames of desire singed both parties, the man and the woman. In this, the Turner films frequently paralleled her own life story, for all too often what began as an impulsive romance ended insordid recriminations or even tragedy. The pattern was the be repeated in the Fifties, for awaiting her were more fame and riches, more husbands and more lovers--among them, Johnny Stompanato, who ended his career as the recipient of a knife wielded by Lana's by-then-teenaged daughter, Cheryl.

• • •

Another fugitive from Artie Shaw's school for young brides was Ava Gardner, who came to Hollywood in 1940 under circumstances less than auspicious. Born Ava Lavinia Gardner on a North Carolina farm on Christmas Eve, 1922, she was the fifth--and last--child of sharecropper Jonas Gardner. After her father's death, Ava helped her mother run a boardinghouse and studied shorthand and typing in high school. But her then-brother-in-law, Larry Tarr, noticing the fledgling beauty of his cleft-chinned young relative, prevailed upon her to go to New York, where he promised to get her work as a model. Tarr took hundreds of pictures of Ava and, unable to place them with the agencies, displayed them prominently in the windows of five New York office saw some of them and was so captivated that he distributed copies in his firm's talent department. Discouraged by her failure to find work, Ava had already entrained for North Carolina, but she was home only a few days when The Call came from an MGM talent scout who wanted to make a screen test of her. Her Tarheel accent proved so thick, however, that he deemed it wiser to test her silently, and while the was being shipped to the West Coast, Ava was set to studying diction. When approval came from Culver City, MGM's studio location, she headed west with a $50-a-week contract tucked away in her luggage.

Her first four years at MGM were not propitious. The studio liked her looks, but was of the opinion that she couldn't act her way through a high school Christmas pageant. And there was still that accent. She was given several small roles, but these were mainly due to the influence in Mickey Rooney, then MGM's biggest juvenile draw, who liked Ava's looks enough to marry her in January 1942. "We were children," Ava afterward commented about this marriage, which lasted all of 18 months. Howard Hughes next reportedly took an interest in the green-eyed beauty, but the relationship foundered when she refused to confine herself to him alone--or so the gossips said. Gossip of the time also had it that Ava had managed to read only one book from cover to cover until her meeting with the erudite Artie Shaw, that book being Gone with the Wind. After marrying her in 1945, Artie felt that her lack of broad cultural horizons must be immediately corrected. The subsequent story is not unfamiliar: According to reputable authority, Ava was fed massive doses of Proust, Thomas Wolfe, Thomas Mann and, for a well-earned dessert, Karl Marx' Das Kapital. (It's said that she spelled "capital" with a K for many months thereafter.) To augment this regimen, Shaw sent her to UCLA for courses in psychology and English literature--upon which Ava began to display nervous symptoms and was sent to a psychiatrist.

When Shaw discovered--once again--that beauty was not necessarily accompanied by brains, be took legal way out. Although his marriage to Ava lasted little more than a year, its tenure was to have at least one lasting effect on Ava's later habits to life and love. Among the tomes given to her by Shaw was Heming-way's Death in the Afternoon; from it flowered her preoccupation, not to say obsession, with bullfighting and bullfighters.

But that was in the Fifties, the decade in which Ava became, according to a conclave of Hollywood sculptors and artists, " the most perfect modern Venus in America." By that time, she also symbolize the restless, disenchanted star who had tired of constantly, as she put it' "exhibiting your façades until you begin to wonder if anyone will ever be interested in what's behind your looks." Certainly, during the Forties, it was mainly her "façades" that enraptured the movie-goers. Writing of Whistle Stop (1946), in (continued on page 172)Sex in Cinema(continued from page 169) which she played her first major part, a critic said that "Ava Gardner brings nothing but appearance to the role." A few months later, she was seen to better effect in The Killers, an amplification of the Hemingway short story. There was no question after this film--so full of approving whistles was the audiences' response to her--that she was headed for the full star treatment; and yet, during the remainder of the Forties, her vehicles were such that her career and image were only moderately advanced. She won nods of approval from the critics as the torch singer who was Gable's girlfriend in The Hucksters (1947), but she was a decidedly lackluster love goddess in the 1948 film version of One Touch of Venus. In the decade that followed, however, she not only became the headline-haunted wife of Frank Sinatra but flowered into one of the right's--all of which will be chronicled in a later installment.

As with every decade, the films of the Forties had their share of exotics--foreign-born (or foreign-seeming) creatures who exuded a come-hither type of sexual allure most ofter described by press agents as "smoldering." Lupe Velez, the Mexican spitfire of the Thirties, took her own life in 1944; but Dorothy Lamour remained on hand for vampish parodies, ofter appearing with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in their popular Road series. Early in the Forties, however, her eminence in this field was seriously challenged by a dark-haired, olive-skinned beauty named Maria Montez. In tune with the times, Universal's Publicity department promptly dubbed her the "Splendang Girl"--splendang being the type of sarong the shapely señorita sported in her first starríng role, in South of Tahiti (1941). So skimpy were the harem and jungle costumes provided for her by the studio that once she annonced to the pres, with a straight face, that someday she would like to do a movie in which she wore clothes. "My peectures are getting nakeder and nakeder," she complanined. Maria's Hollywood career came to an end with Siren of Atlantis (1949), after which she went to Europe with her husband, French film star Jean-Pierre Aumont. There she died in 1951, drowned in her own bathtub; reportedly the victim of a heart attack, she was found by her sister Adita and her heartbroker husband. Curiously, however, she lives on today in a kind of demilife, a heroine of New York's "underground" film cultists. Not only have several written about her but one has even gone so far as to dedicate a movie of his to the departed sex queen.

• • •

Brooklyn-born Gene Tierney also rates as an exotic, thanks to her high cheekbones and her narrow, piercing, greenishblue eyes. One of her earlier roels, for example, cast her as "Mother" Gin Sling's Eurasian daughter, Poppy, in Josef von Sternberg's remake of the venerable Shanghai Gesture. At other times she was Indian, Polynesian, Egyptian, Russian, Chinese, Italian and Spanish; her own parentage was actually an admixture of Swedish, Irish, French and Spanish. Her father, a wealthy New York broker, saw to it that she received an education suitable to a budding socialite: exclusive private schools in the East and a fashionable finishing school in Lausanne, Switzerland. Her first screen offer came by chance when, on a vacation in California, she happened to visit a movie set, was noticed by a director and immediately given a test. Her family, however, insisted that she return to Connecticut and continue her schooling. Soon after, in the course of social visit with George Abbott, the distinguished Broadway director was so impressed with her fresh 18-year-old beauty that he offered her a role in his production of The Male Animal. This time the parents consented; and during the run of the play, she was spotted by a Fox talent scout, given another screen test and returned to Hollywood as a prime prospect for stardom. Although her first screen appearance, in The return of Frank James (1940), elicited from the editors of The Harvard Lampoon a special award as "The Worst Discovery of 1940," the youthful Miss Tierney soon proved them myopic when it came to assessing star potential. At first exploited in roles that required little more than good looks and an occasional seductive glance, she gradually progressed to dramatic parts, gibing good account of herself in such films as Laura, Dragonwyck and Leave Her to Heaven.

In 1941, aged 20, Gene became a countess by marrying dress disigner (and count) Oleg Cassini. Their first child was born mentally defective, a circumstance that has forever defective, a circumstance that has forever weighed heavily upon the actress, and the marriage itself ended in divorce a few years later. According to director Otto Preminger, the young John F. Kennedy paid several visits to the set of Laura while its filming was in progress--and not to learn about moviemaking. For a time, her name was also linked with Aly Khan, after his divorce from Rita Hayworth. (In those days, it was always either Aly Khan of Artie Shaw who got the beautiful girls.)The romance fizzled out, however, and with it, at least temporarily, Gene's career; she retired to a rest home, the victim of nervous exhaustion. Now married again, and beautiful as ever, she makes an occasional visit to Hollywood for "cameo" appearances in films such as Advise and Consent or Toys in the Attic. The roles she plays today, however, are chic and well groomed, a trifle matronly and a far cry from the Eurasian temptresses and Polynesian princesses of yesteryear.

• • •

Alas, no such happy ending awaited diminutive Veronica Lake, whose famous "peekaboo" hairdo was every bit as popular during the War years as Jane Russell's bosom or Betty Grable's legs. Her special appeal during that period was once fervently summed up by John Rossell Taylor, of the esteemed British film journal Sight and Sound; "Ah,'" he wrote, "the tensions that would build up in a film as one waited for the invitation in the strangely husky voice, in the provocative swing of the sequined box shoulder, to reach its consummation at a moment of climactic abandon when the face-obscuring mane of blonde hair would be swept aside in an embrace and reveal the full glory of the large, lustrous eyes, the slightly sunken cheeks and thin, heavily made-up lips which marked the apogee of Forties glamor." With all that, one scarcely had to act. The story has it that when she appeared on a set for the first time, the director cried out, "My God, that hair of yours hides one eye completely." Veronica obligingly put it up in curls--and wound up, cinematically speaking, on the cutting-room floor. Three films later, after little of no success, she was finally permitted to wear her hair herown way. Cast as a sultry and obliging night-club singer in I Wanted Wings (1941), Veronica was an overnight sensation.

It was the boys in the Paramount cutting rooms who first recognized her star quality. "A half-pint Harlow," was their perceptive estimate, and a number of the reviews of the completed picture echoed this opinion. The New York World-Telegram took note of her revealing costumes: "She sports a décolletage," its critic remarked, "that goes farther down south than Savannah." The Legion of Decency indicated its awarencess of the newcomer's charms in its own way: It placed I Wanted Wings on its "Condemned in Part" list, citing as cause the film's "suggestive costuming."

In such films as Sullivan's Travels, This Gun for Hire, The Glass Key and I Married a Witch, the fetishistic appeal of the long blonde hair and the obscured eye was systematically explored, and Veronica's personal style turned into a national fad--until the Government stepped in. There was a war on, and woman in great numbers had gone to work in shops and factories. Put simply, the new hairdos were snagging in the wheels of the war machine. veronica was not only prevailed upon to adopt a less-abandoned hair style but she also traveled ceaselessly about country, selling war bonds and expatiating on the theme that short hair could win the War. This may have been one reason for the precipitous decline of her film career. With both eyes showing, some of her mystery was gone. By the time hostilities had ended and she could resume the "peekaboo" style, it was almost too late. A few more pictures, each of them less impressive than the one before, and she was through. Her name still corps up occasionally in the newspapers, however--most recently when, as a cocktail waitress in New York, she was arrested on a "drunk and disorderly" charge.

• • •

There were, of course, innumerable other sexpots during the Forties, shapely and comely girls such as Linda Darnell, Virginia Mayo, Cyd Charisse, Yvonnede Carlo and Marilyn Maxwell, but all of these--and more--seemed somewhat second-string, cuties who got the nod whenever the first team was out playing somewhere else. Others, such as Esther Williams, Eleanor Parker and red-haired Susan Hayward, werer established during the Forties but found their greatest successes in the subsequent decade. And there were also the durable few--Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Katharine hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Rosalind Russell, Barbara Stanwyck--who seemed to bridge the decades effortlessly, altering their images to fit the prevailing fashions in feminine appeal and allure. These were not merely personalities elevated to stardom by a trick with the hair or an inspired adjective from the publicity department. These were actresses; and their slender ranks were joined during the Forties by Sweden's Ingrid Bergman and Ireland's Greer Garson. Coincidentally, Miss Bergman and Miss Garson were also Hollywood's two most authentic beauties of the period.

Born is Stockholm in 1917 of a Swedish father and a German mother, Ingrid Bergman studied acting in Sweden's prestigious Royal Dramatic Theatre School, then went quickly into Swedish films. David O. Selznick saw one of these, Intermezzo, in which she played a young music student who has an affair with a distinguished concert violinist. Selznick was so impressed that he not only bought the film, which he later (1939) reshot in Hollywood with Leslie Howard as the musician, but he brought Bergman along she was on Broadway starring in Liliom with Burgess Meredith and Elia Kazan. By this time, she had married Peter Lindstrom, a Stockholm dentist (later turned surgeon), and had given birth to a daughter, Pia. All very respectable--but wait.

Ingrid's Hollywood career burgeoned. In quick succession, she appeared opposite Warner Baxter in Adam Had Four Sons, with Robert Montgomery in Rage in Heaven and as a loose cockney barmaid in the 1941 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with Spencer Tracy. I one scene from that film, she participated in a hallucination of the good doctor's who visualizes her on a bed of roses, her shoulders bare and her long hair loose; as the hallucination progresses, however, the flowers turn to viscous, slimy mud through which the lovely but sluttish barmaid is dragged and horribly smeared. Her reward was the first of her several Academy Award nominations. Casablanca, in which she co-starred with Humphrey Bogart, captured so well the bittersweet romantic mood of the period that it immediately became a box-office smash. Although by 1942 Ingrid was being offered her pick of roles, the one she most coveted was that of Maria, the war-ravaged heroine of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls; Hemingway himself had put in a word for her. Paramount, however, regarded her still-apparent Swedish accent as too much of a handicap and cast dancer Vera Zorina for the role instead. Two weeks after filming began, the company realized its mistake and hastily summoned Ingrid to share Gary Cooper's sleeping bag and help him make "the earth move." Censorship managed to make their two-in-one sleeping-bag arrangement seem as cozy and socially acceptable as bundling, but Ingrid won another Academy nomination anyway. The following year she won the Oscar for her performance in Gaslight, the tale of a wife being driven mad by her scheming husband, Charles Boyer.

By the time 1945 rolled around, she so dominated the screen that it was considered smart to crack, "I saw a picture without Ingrid Bergman in it." In that one year, she played a nun in The Bells only St. Mary's, a psychiatrist in Hitchcock's Spellbound and a French adventuress in Saratoga Trunk, her blonde tresses concealed by a sleek dark wig. The following year, in Notorious, Hitchcock employed her again, this time as a somewhat-besmirched spy who helps Cary Grant track down a Nazi uranium ring in South America. The film is perhaps best remembered for its director's inventive staging of a nonstop kissing duel between the two leads-- a kiss that begins on a balcony, is vaguely disturbed by the persistent ringing of a telephone inside, and continues during a long trek across the room to the fofending phone, where Ingrid continues to nuzzle while Cary talks to his secret-service boss. The audience was left to assume--and Ingrid's attentive behavior virtually confirmed--that it would take an earthquake to interrupt their love play after that.

Meanwhile, as it happened, there was an earthquake in the making. In Italy, the passionate and gifted director Rober-to Rossellini had singlehandedly given rise to the neorealist movement with his two pictures Open City and Paisan. Widely hailed, they had caught the interest of Hollywood--and of Ingrid Bergman. She so admired his genius after seeing Paisan that she wrote to him:

Dear Mr. Rossellini: I saw your films...and enjoyed them very much. If you need a Swedish actress who speaks English very well, who has not forgotten her German, who is not very understandable in French, and who in Italian knows only "ti amo," I am ready to come and make a film with you.

Although Rossellini was still married, and also involved with his Italian leading lady. Anna Magnani, he wasted no time in answering. He cabled her, in part:

I just received with great emotion your letter which happens to arrive on the anniversary of my birthday as the most precious gift stop it is absolutely true that I dreamed to make a film with you and from this very moment I will do everything that such dream becomes reality...

While Ingrid was in London, making Under Capricorn for Hitchcock, she flew to Paris for her first meeting with Rossellini. It was agreed between them that they would do a film together. shortly thereafter, Rossellini flew to New York to accept a critics' award for Paisan, then went on to California for another meeting with Ingrid, her husband (who was her manager as well as a surgeon) and some movie moguls. Omar Garrison, a reporter for the Los Angeles Evening Mirror, was meanwhile printing some cocky quotes. According to Garrison, Rossellini had told him, "Swedish women are the easiest in the world to impress, because they have such cold husbands." And before flying to America, "the Ace of Hearts," as Garrison dubbed him, had reputedly boasted, "I'm going to put the horns on Mr. Bergman." If that was what Rossellini actually said, he was as good as his word. Ingrid joined him on the barren, volcanic island of Stromboli to make the picture of that name, and rumor soon had it that the name, and rumor soon had it that the director and his lovely star were sharing common quarters--as indeed they were. Their idyl of creative togetherness provided the columnists with so many juicy tidbits that the resulting scandal rocked the nation like nothing since the Teapot Dome revelations of the Twenties. Boycotts of Ingrid's films were threatened; she was denounced on the floor of the U.S. Senate as "Hollywood's apostle of degradation." As a fitting climax to Ingrid's shattering of convention, it was revealed that she was pregnant--by Rossellini.

A frenzied Mexican proxy divorce for Ingrid and an Austrian annulment of Rossellini's marriage made it possible for the two to arrange a proxy marriage in Mexico, but not before little Robertino was born in Rome. It was another two years before Lindstrom would consent to a California decree, by which time the Bergman-Rossellini ménage had been augmented by a pair of twin. Although she continued to make films abroad with her husband, none of them either particularly noteworthy or successful, her career in the United States not only had come to a dead halt but appeared to be wrecked for good. She had done the unforgivable: She had broken the image.

As permissive as the American public sometimes is about the peccadilloes of screen stars--the sensational sex life of Mary Astor in an earlier decade, for example, and in later years when the Elizabeth Taylor--Richard Burton affair flowered into sensational headlines--this was not so in Ingrid Bergman's cse. Even though in the earlier portion of her career she had played a trollop in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, she was by now associated in the public mind with such roles as the good nun of The Bells of St. Mary's the innocent wife terrorized in Gaslight and the sainted Joan of Arc. When she flew in the face of these "respectable" portrayals with her real-life nonconformity--by abandoning her role of wife and mother to cohabit with an Italian film director of hardly the most savory moral reputation and to bear that same director's child out of wedlock--this was simply too much for the public to simply too much for the public to countenance. she had flagrantly violated its naïve conception of her, and for this she was made to suffer harshly. By the mid-Fifties, the romance was at an end; Rossellini, off in India, had precipitated another scandal by embarking on an affair with Sonali Das Gupta, the screenwriter wife of an Indian film director. But apparently the American public felt that Ingrid had now been sufficiently "punished" for her indiscretions. When she returned in 1956 for Anastasia, she won not only wide box-office acceptance but an Academy Award as well. It was as if, by honoring her for her public performance, the industry was showing its forgiveness for her private one. In any case, one had to admit that she had demonstrated style and fortitude through it all.

• • •

Greer Garson was something else again. The hot breath of scandal never singed her red-gold locks or brought the slightest flush to her creamy complexion. Throughout the entire decade, she represented everything that was sweet, cheerful and wholesome in the movies--and not once did she let her vast audience down on screen or off. She could suffer noble and beautifully (chin up, moist eyes looking off to the horizon or up at the stars.), and thus she offered a sense of identification for lonely wartime wives, sweethearts and widow. Certainly she was Louis B. Mayer's favorite. When he discovered her, in 1938, she was already an important and well-established star of London's fashionable West End theaters. When she popped from behind a Swiss rock to meet Robert Donat's startled gaze in her first film, Goodbye Mr.Chips, a vision of sane, bread-and-butter loveliness, both her fame and her image were established. Soon she was caught up in the machinery of MGM's star system, and kept playing much the same part--the charming, sensible, utterly dependable "Mrs." to Walter Pidgeon's, Ronald Colman's or Gregory Peck's "Mr."

Although in many ways the antithesis of the sex star, in at least two of her films, Random Harvest and Julia Misbehaves, she demonstrated that, in addition to other talents, she possessed one of the loveliest pairs of legs that ever twinkled from a screen. In Random Harvest, they were the highlight of her act when, dressed in kilt and long black stocking's she did a music-hall impression of Sir Harry Lauder. But it was for her portrayal of a staid, courageous wartime wife in Mrs. Miniver that she was best remembered; and when, after the War, Metro attempted to change her image by co-starring her with Clark Gable in Adventure--"Gable's Back and Garson's Got Him"--nothing happened. Through the early Forties, however, she remained one of that star-spangled studio's biggest money-makers and its reigning queen. She maintained a sense of humor about her high position, though, once remarking that MGM's initials really stood for her: Metro's Golden Mare.

• • •

Although American films of the Forties were kept under censorial wraps, not even the censors could prevent the emergence of an authentic, provocative and delightfully disturbing new sex queen, a girl whose frankness about what she wanted and how she proposed to get it projected into another era. When James Agee of Time saw her first picture, To Have and Have Not (1944), he rhapsodized: "Twenty-year-old Lauren Bacall has a javelinlike vitality, a born dancer's eloquence in movement, a fierce female shrewdness and a special sweet-sourness. With these faculties, plus a stone-crushing self-confidence and a trombone voice, she manages to get across the toughest girl a piously regenerate Hollywood has dreamed of in a long, long while. Sure to bring down any decently vulgar house is her comment on Bogart's ssecond,l emboldened kiss: 'It's even better when you help.' She does a wickedly good job of sizing up male prospects in a low bar, and growls a louche song more suggestively then anyone in cinema has dared since Mae West." Certainly not since Mae West had any new female personality so electrified audiences. They loved her looks, her manner and her lines. In To Have and Have Not, with a sort of low grow, she educated humphrey Bogart in the proper--or improper--approach toward a girl like her: "You don't have to say anything and you don't have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just--whistle. You know how to whistle, don't you? You just put your lips together--and blow."

Lauren came by her last name when her mother and father separated in 1932 and the mother changed her maiden name from Weinstein (which means wineglass in German) to Bacal (which means the same in Russian). Born Betty Joan Perske in New York City, in 1924, Lauren attended that city's high school for bright girls Julia Richmond, and after graduation, modeled for a garment manufacturer. She disliked the work, though, and went to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, after which she became a theater usherette. Soon after, she found work as a model as Harper's Bazaar, and her appearance on its March 1943 cover precipitated her movie career. Mrs. Howard Hawks saw it, showed it to her husband and, after the usual screen test, he signed her to a personal contract. Hawks coached his discovery for nine months, and changed her name to Lauren Bacall.

Humphrey Bogart, the star of To Have and Have Not, changed her name again--first to "Baby" and then, 11 days after his divorce from actress Mayo Methot became final (May 21,1945), to Mrs. Humphrey Bogart. The hard-bitten actor took to the rangy, somewhat insolent girl at once, and aided the director considerably in the star-building process. "Without Bogey's help," Hawks later admitted, "I couldn't have done what I did with Bacall. Not many actors would sit around and wait while a girl steals a scene. But he fell in love with the girl and the girl with him, and that made it easy." Actually, she was the perfect foil for Bogart's tough way with women, giving the impression that the harder the man, the more strongly she could strike back or love back although the couple made only three more films together--The Big Sleep, Dark Passage and Key Largo--these were enough to establish the since, sometimes dramatically, more often in recent years in screen or stage comedies. Today, married to actor Jason Robards, Jr., she tends to concentrate her activity on Broadway where she has come to epitomize the slightly mannish, rapier-witted female. During the Forties, when the studios concentrated on leg art, Lauren Bacall was something of an anomaly. "My idea of sex is that it is mostly in the face," she said, and refused to pose for pinups. During the Fifties, as sex in the movies became increasingly a bosom fixation, she simply took her talents elsewhere.

• • •

"They're either too young or too old," wailed Bette Daivs in a wartime movie musical, thus echoing the plaint of many a Forties maiden surveying the civilian leftovers after Uncle Sam had taken first choice. It is not too surprising, with millions of men in uniform and far from years assumed an importance in the dreamy constellations of the opposite gender that was unprecedented since the days of Valentino. Whether it be the pseudosophisticated charm of Brian Aherne or the boy-next-doorishness of the befreckled Van Johnson, the bedimpled Robert Walker or the be-Pepsodented William Holden, the girls latched onto them as surrogate lovers until their own boys came marching home. In those halcyon years (halcyon, at least, for male movie actors who managed to dodge the draft), it took only one good role to ensure a fairly substantial future. They didn't have to act-- they just had to lok male. "The best is in the Army," Bette's lament continued. "What's left will never harm me..."

Curiously, the one great male star who shot into the movie firmament during the War years and has remained there ever since was neither boyish nor sophisticated--just indubitable male: Humphrey Bogart. bogart was born in 1899 in New York City to Belmont DeForest Bogart, a surgeon, and Maud Humphrey, a well-known illustrator of children, who used her infant son as a model for the famous "Maud Humphrey Baby." Bogart was never happy about his first name--"I got stuck with it," he liked to say--and much preferred the later appellation, Bogey. Even in his youth, Bogey revealed a certain intractability--as when he was expelled from Phillips Academy in Andover for tossing an unpopular teacher into a fountain. At 17, with World War One in progress, young Humphrey joined the Navy; his ship was shelled and a wood splinter entered his lip, permanently damaging it and thus fixing his tight-lipped manner of speech and the slight lisp that were eventually to become his movie trademarks. He tried a few odd jobs after the War, including several months in a Wall Street broker-age, but was oriented toward and acting career when William A Brady, a friend of his father's, hired him as company manager for one of his plays then just about to go on the road. Brady also asked him, during the tour, to do a brief walk-on as a houseboy carrying a tray of dishes. bogey inadverttly dropped the tray and drew a huge howl from the audience.

Undaunted, however, he stayed with the stage and appeared frequently on Broadway during the Twenties, usually as a romantic juvenile. He was the first to utter that classic stage invitation of smart-set sophisticates, "Tennis, anyone?" By the time he went to Hollywood for the first time, in 1930, he had already been married twice, to Helen Menken and Mary Phillips, both of them actresses he had appeared with on the stage. Two years and nine eminently forgettable pictures later, Bogart decided that the movies were not his medium and returned to the theater. But in another two years he was back again, after Leslie Howard, who had starred in The Petrified Forest on Broadway, assured Warner Bros. that he would not appear in their film version unless they would also sign the Duke Mantee of the New York run, Humphrey Bogart. Warners, with such top cinematic gangsters as Jimmy Cagney and Edward G. Robinson already under contract, was understand-ably reluctant to add to its underworld stable; but Howard was then at the very peak of his popularity and adamant about keeping the promise he had made to Bogart when they were working together.

Stage-trained, and with a strong, forceful personality, Bogart quickly commanded attention upon his second incursion into Hollywood; but in the late Thirties, male leads tended to fall to such clean-cut young chaps as Robert Taylor, Tyrone Power or Don Ameche, While Clark Gable and Gary Cooper afforded the prototypes for more rugged roles. Obviously, Bogart didn't fit comfortable into either category; and so, in the next two dozen pictures he turned out after The Petrified Forest (1936), with few exceptions, he played either a villain or a gangster, the perfect personification of a gangland hood, an implacable force of evil. The tide began to turn for him in 1941. In High Sierra, he was a gangster again--actually, a "mad dog" killer, the last of the Dillinger mob--but a superior script by John Huston plunged beneath the grim exterior to reveal an affecting inner core of sentiment and yearning. The more familiar Bogart began to emerge, hard but sympathetic. After having arranged an operation for a crippled girl (Joan Leslie) and baring his soul to an amorous taxi dancer (Ida Lupino) with whom he shacks up in a mountain hide-out, his demise at the hands of the police comes more as pure tragedy than as a triumph for law and order.

Although Bogart received outstanding notices for his work in High Sierra, his status son the Warner lot did not immediately improve, as witness the fact that he was replaced on Out of the Fog by John Garfiedl when Ida Lupino objected to having to live again with his salty language and not always gentlemanly conduct on the set. As far as the studio was concerned, however, he was still its favorite gangster. Not that Bogart ever objected to playing the villain. As he once put it, "When the heavy, full of crime and bitterness, grabs his wounds and talks about death and taxed in a husky voice, the audience is his and his alone." But he sensibly did object to trite, stereotyped and shoddily written parts, and was not at all reticent about letting the all-powerful Jack L. Warner know it. For a time, Warner retaliated by casting his recalcitrant contract player in some of the sheerest drivel his studio ever turned out.

When Bogey began to rise in the public's esteem--in 1941, with High sierra--it was less because his roles had changed than because audiences had changed. Perhaps they had had their fill of handsome profiles and vacant faces. They were ready now for faces that looked as if they had been lived in, for heel-heroes, for antiheroes. Bogey, they 43, amply filled the bill. He triumphed again that same year as Sam Spade, Dashiell Hammett's unscrupulous private eye, in John Huston's classic remake of The Maltese Falcon. The film established one basic element of the Bogart pattern: Make hay with the dames, good or bad, but see that they get what's coming to them. As Spade, he was quite willing to make love to the murderous Mary Astor, but had no compunction whatsoever about delivering her into the clutches of the law after piecing together the details of her crimes. His rugged code of ethics was further exemplified in Casablanca when he snarled, "I'm not sticking my neck out for nobody"--not even, in this case, for Ingrid Bergman. But there was a softer side to him as well, one that he took great pains to conceal. Ingrid's repeated requests to Sam, the Negro night-club pianist, to play again As Time Goes By, for example, simply drove Bogart, the club's proprietor, right up his own walls. The tune reminded him of a girl he had loved and lost. Privately, though, Bogart often referred to Miss Bergman as "the only lady in Hollywood"--a remark to which his third wife, Mayo Methot, took violent umbrage.

Mayo was an actress who appeared with Bogart in Marked Woman (1937); they were married the following year. It was a marriage enlivened by such frequent and public brawls that columnists soon dubbed them "the battlìng Bogarts." And when they were not fighting between themselves, Mayo was not above egging on her two-fisted husband to belt his frequent hecklers, many of them barhounds anxious to test their own toughness aganist the world's most famous tough guy. "There's madness in his Methot," one with observed after a family squabble at a party developed into a free-for-al that almost wrecked the place. A certain amount of imbibing may have been involved, for Bogart was always inordinately fond of the sauce; but no less was due to a basic incompatibility. By the time he met Lauren Bacall, in 1944, his marriage to Mayo was all but over. It was Howard Hawks who brought the two Howard Hawks who brought the two together, preparatory to their filming To Have and Hve Not. "I've seen your test," Bogart remarked at that first meeting. "It looks like we're gonna work together and have a lot of fun." They did. Lauren has always contended that her affair with Bogart was not the cause of his breakup with mayo. He and Mayo had separated by then--although, after the film was finished, Bogart briefly rejoined his wife. But the divorce came through on May 10, 1945, and on May 21 Bogart married his "Baby," who was 25 years his junior. Shortly thereafter, Mayo joined the ranks of the Hollywood suicides, Unlike the vituperative calumny heaped upon Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini, Bogey and his "Baby" encountered not the slightest public resentment of their union. After all, they had not disturbed their worldly public images.

Though the romance between Bogart and Bacall had received extensive press coverage, their marriage came to the public as something of a surprise because of the considerable age difference. Even more surprising was the long-lasting harmony that developed between the two. Lauren was one of Bogart's two great loves, the other being his yacht, Santana, a 55-foot, $55,000 vessel of graceful proportions. Since Lauren had no particular affection for boating, Bogart accorded to each a separate devotion. The Bogarts appeared together in three more films, all of them set within a society that was, as an English writer a society that was, as an English writer put it, "raffish and corrupt behind the chromium plate of night club, cocktail bar, swimming pool and air-conditioned mansion: the society of blackmailers, gunmen, professional gamblers and loose lovelies; of the love nest on the side road, and bourbon for breakfast in shuttered rooms where it is always night." Bogart brought to this world a sophistication it had never possessed in the grim Thirties, for the war-swollen economy had made the stakes higher and the surroundings plusher. But Bogart was never taken in by these material trappings; his hard-boiled cynicism remained, whatever the circumstances. He never blew his cool.

In the years that remained to him, Bogart repeatedly astonished even his fans with his depth and versatility as an actor. He was one star who could appear on the screen unkempt, belching and emaciated, and still inspire vast affection from audiences. A natural choice or the role of the seedy adventurer corrupted by greed in John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, he turned in a masterful performance. And in 1951, he managed to steal an Academy Award right out form under Marlon Brando's Stanley kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire with his river-rat impersonation of Charlie Alnutt in The African Queen. Speaking of his rawboned costar, Katharine Hepburn, Bogart admitted he couldn't stand her for the first two weeks. "She talked to you like you were a microphone. She didn't want any answers." But then he began to admire the unusual and affecting romance out of the pairing of a dyspeptic rumpot and an iron-willed (and ironclad) old maid caught in German East Africa just after the outbreak of World War one. Bogart gave several other fine performances--notably in Beat the Devil, The Caine Mutiny, Sabrina and The Barefoot Contessa--before cancer of the esophagus cut him down in 1957.

Director Richard Brooks has ascribed the Bogart cult that arose after his death to two main factors. "For one thing," Brooks told writer Ezra Goodman, "he was not a sentimentalist. That's important to people today. It's not a sentimental world we're living in as far as the youth is concerned today. Secondly, his relationship with woman on the screen. In Casablanca, when it came time for him to make it clear he loved a woman, he fought against the movie clichés like "I can't live without you." He played it and he played off against it." When Bergman attempted to take his passport at gun-point he flagrantly ignored the menace of the pistol, walked right up to her and embraced her, saying, "I'll make it easy for you." Under those conditions, Ingrid simply couldn't pull the trigger.

Since 1965, books about Bogart have been rolling off the presses; of all the great stars of the Forties--male and female alike, these works invariably assert--he was the one who most completely typified the period. But as Brooks has suggested, his lingering effect is perhaps due less to his being symptomatic of his time than to a more contemporary relevance. He managed--still manages--to reflect a kind of simplistic truth and honesty in a world gone rotten. He paid thin lip service to the law; he endured savage beatings that left him bruised but spiritually unbroken; and in film after film he would mouth his defiance of the corrupt powers that be, right up to the moment their bullets ripped him apart. One can only imagine the obscenity with which he would, very likely, have greeted the French intellectuals' worship of him and "the existentialist sadness" he supposedly represented. Never-theless, long after his death, such French film stars as Jean-Paul Belmondo and the American expatriate Eddie Constantine continue to slink around on screen in raincoat or trench coat, emulating both his garb and his manerisms; while the fantasy myth of the uncorruptible, indestructible but alto-gether hedonistic defender of the faith, which he embodied, survives today in the even more invincible James Bonds and Matt Helms. "All he has to do the dominate a scene is enter it," Raymond Chandler once said about Bogart. In a sense, he is still dominating the scene.

• • •

During the early Forties, despite Hollywood's patriotic efforts to give the impression that it lived cleanly and thought only of winning the War, scandals continued to raise their unlovely heads--like that which involved the handsome, swashbuckling romantic hero Errol Flynn. Flynn, who once endearingly described himself as "a male Mae West," during the War years alternated his more accustomed swordplay in costume epics with gunplay in such wartime adventure films as Desperate Journey, Edge of Darkness and Objective Burma. Singlehandedly he brought our nation's enemies to heel. Back on the home front, meanwhile, in 1942, he was decorated for something less than galantry in action. Flynn suddenly found himself charged with that bugaboo of the teenage-girl fancier, statutory rape; he was accused of having compelled two underage girls, Betty Hansen and Peggy Satterlee, to submit to sexual intercourse--on separate occasions, we hasten to add. In California, the minimum penalty for sexual dalliance with a girl under 18, regardless of her willingness, is five years in jail. If the charges could be proved--and Flynn, in his autobiography, makes it clear that Los Angeles' new district attorney. John Dockwiler, did everything in his power to make them stick--then he was in grave peril, indeed. Although the two alleged incidents had taken place over a year apart, the D.A. combined them into a single, damaging case. Flynn did what many Hollywood personalities have done under similar trying circumstances: He called in the noted criminal lawyer Jerry Giesler.

To take up the Betty Hansen accusation first, it was her contention that Flynn had put her to bed in a bachelor friend's bedroom, ostensibly for a nap, and then had whisked off her clothes and enjoyed her carnally. Under Giesler's adroit cross-examination, she admitted that she had been a willing party to the doings and that she had hoped to advance herself in a film career by these traditional means; but no matter--she was 17 at the time. Flynn denied the charge categorically, as he denied Miss Satterlee's story that she (allegedly also 17, although Giesler succeeded in raising some doubts on that score) had hopped aboard his yacht, Sirocco, for a weekend cruise to Catalina and that, en voyage, Flynn had spiked her glass of milk with rum to make her sleepy and more agreeable. After she had downed her milk like a good child, Flynn kissed her warmly, she said, and showed her to her cabin. Some sample court testimony by the pigtailed Peggy (who had adopted that hair style specifically for her court appearances) follows:

[Q] Giesler: When you heard the knock on the door, did you hear somebody say something?

[A] Peggy: They did not wait long enough to say anything. They just came in.

[Q] Giesler: When they came in, did they say anything?

[A] Peggy: I said something first.

[Q] Giesler: Something about it being kind of late, or something, or what?

[A] Peggy: No, sir, I noticed he walked in before he said anything. I said, "You should not be here," and he said, "I just want to talk to you," and I said, "You should not be here, because it is not nice to come in a lady's bedroom when she is in bed..."

[Q] Giesler: Did he sit on the side of the bed?

[A] Peggy: Well, he did not sit there.

[Q] Giesler: He stood there?

[A] Peggy: He stood in the doorway awhile talking, and then he said to me, well...

[Q] Giesler: Go ahead and tell us what he said. I would like to have everything he said.

[A] Peggy: Well, he said to me he just wanted to talk to me, and I told you a while ago what I said, and he said, "Let me just get in bed with you and I will not bother you. I just want to talk to you." And so I said, "Why do you have to bother a nice girl?" And I don't remember what he said after that...

[Q] Giesler: Did you let him get in bed?

[A] Peggy: No, sir.

[Q] Giesler: Did he get in bed?

[A] Peggy: Yes, sir...

[Q] Giesler: Did he say anything to you about sex before he got into bed?

[A] Peggy: No, he just said I asked for it so I would get it.

[Q] Giesler: That is, after he had asked to get in bed and you said no, it wasn't nice for him to come in the room where a lady is in bed?

[A] Peggy: Yes, sir.

[Q] Giesler: And then he said, "Well, I won't be nice to you," or did he say that?

[A] Peggy: That is when he said, "I wanted to be nice to you, but you asked for it, so you will get it."

[Q] Giesler: When he said that, what did he do?

[A] Peggy: Well, he just walked over to the bed, pulled down the covers and pulled up my slip and pulled down my pants...

With this kind of testimony, the celebrated "rape" case all but drove the War news off the front pages. Since Peggy's pigtails and bobby sox contrasted somewhat oddly with her voluptuous appearance, Giesler not only bore down heavily on this fact but revealed that she had recently performed in an abbreviated costume at a Hollywood night club. The wily attorney also managed to get into the record an unsavory sexual episode in the girl's past and evidence of an abortion more than a year after the fling with Flynn. Perhaps the high point of the trial, however, was Peggy's story of how he had his wicked way with her all over again early the following morning, as the Sirocco was tacking its way back to port. Flynn lured her from the deck to the aftercabin, she insisted, on the pretext of showing her how beautiful the moon looked through a porthole. The line she ascribed to him--"Darling, look out the porthole. You see that glorious moon?"--pursued him for the rest of his life.

In Flynn's posthumously published autobiography, My Wicked, Wicked Ways (which its author impishly wanted to title In Like Flynn, capitalizing on the popular expression that his celebrated boudoir behavior had made a part of the language), he admitted that even though the jury of nine women and three men returned a unanimous "not guilty" verdict, the case had left an "enduring scar" upon his personality and took much of the zest out of his acting. He also lamented the fact that "swordsman," the word so often applied to him in motion pictures, henceforth acquired a double-edged connotation in the popular vocabulary. Nevertheless, the irrepressible star was soon off and running again--although with a few more precautions than before. In his doorway at Mulholland House, his baronial home, appeared a neatly printed notice: "Ladies: Kindly be prepared to produce your birth certificate and driver's license and any other identification marks." But his eye had already fallen on Nora Eddington, the blonde, well-stacked 18-year-old (he checked) cookie-pie who ran the cigar counter at the Hall of Justice while the trial was in progress. A few months later, he and Nora were married. (She appeared opposite him in The Adventures of Don Juan.) But his career was already on the skids. The War over, both his combat heroics and the elaborate costume adventure films that had been his stock in trade were suddenly out of style. The publicity given to his preference for relatively unripe girls had little to do with his decline as a star; it was simply that his career ran out of gas. Under contract to Warners until 1952, his roles there degenerated to a series of cheap Westerns and vain efforts to recapture some of the glamor of his earlier pictures. Meanwhile, he had been drinking heavily, was even more heavily in debt, had divorced Nora and married a third time (to Patrice Wymore) and was gathering a reputation as a chaser after ever younger women. A few good supporting roles in the late Fifties--in The Sun Also Rises, Too Much, Too Soon and The Roots of Heaven--did much to salvage his reputation as an actor, but not enough to salvage his career. When he died of a heart attack, on October 14, 1959, it was in the midst of yet another scandal, with teenage Beverly Aadland. Flynn had just turned 50. The coroner who examined the remains stated that it was the body of a tired old man.

• • •

Flynn's attorney, Jerry Giesler, was again on hand for at least the first round in another court battle that was followed as avidly as the news from the battle fronts. In a way, the two were related. As early as July 1942, Charlie Chaplin had publicly demanded a second front in Europe. It was not a popular suggestion. Military strategists termed it premature; ordinary citizens wondered by what right Chaplin, a noncitizen and a comedian, could demand that the United States Government do anything. Throughout the year, as Chaplin continued to speak out, public sentiment turned against him. It boiled over the following year when lush, 22-year-old Joan Barry slapped him with a paternity suit; nor was his case helped by the fact that, with the suit still pending, he married 18-year-old Oona O'Neill. Two years earlier, the trial revealed, Miss Barry had become what was euphemistically called Chaplin's "protégée," He had sent her to dramatic school, straigtened her teeth and bought a play in which she was to make her screen debut. No effort was made to conceal the fact that in the process, the ambitious Miss Barry had also become his mistress. What the trial centered upon was possible violation of the Mann Act--the transportation of women across state lines for immoral purposes. It was revealed that Chaplin had actually given "the Barry woman," as he persistently calls her in his autobiography, both money and a train ticket to New York--but it was just to get her out of Hollywood and his hair, he stoutly maintained. And, he also insisted, it was by sheer coincidence that they had met again in New York in October 1942, when he had gone East to deliver another of his "second-front" speeches. Barry herself delivered the trial's most bizarre bit of testimony: Returning to Los Angeles in December, she spoke of breaking into Chaplin's home at one a.m., holding him at gunpoint while she asked for money, and then being so charmed by him all over again that she submitted to his intimacies. As Giesler later pointed out, "I still don't believe that Chaplin, who could have enjoyed Miss Barry's favors in Los Angeles for as little as 25 cents' carfare, would pay her fare to New York, plus her expenses as a guest at the Waldorf Towers, so she would be there for improper purposes for one occasion only."

The jury evidently agreed, for it exonerated the great comedian on all counts. In the course of the trial, Chaplin, Barry and the baby had all submitted to blood tests (Chaplin later revealed that it took $25,000 to get the lady to consent); and the tests scientifically established that Chaplin, as he had argued right along, could not possibly have been the child's father. Nevertheless, through a legal maneuver, Miss Barry was later able to reopen the case; and in May 1946, despite the blood tests, the court ordered Chaplin to support the child. His popularity was never lower. Father of Miss Barry's child or not, the great Chaplin--the classic screen comedian, the "Little Tramp" of beloved memory--had demeaned himself in the public eye, and he, too, was now among the morally accursed. Chaplin, if we are to believe his autobiography, was sickened by this cant and hypocrisy, and it was in this black mood that, in June 1946, he began his "black comedy," Monsieur Verdoux, the story of a "bluebeard" killer (based vaguely on France's notorious Landru) who marries, then murders a series of wealthy women in order to provide comforts for his first wife and child. Trapped by the law, he points out that he was only doing on a smaller scale what the militarists and munitions makers do in a big way. "Millions sanctify," he murmurs when the trial goes against him. As the final rites are performed, the priest concludes, "And may the Lord have mercy on your soul." "Why not?" asks Chaplin. "After all, it belongs to Him." The film proved a total fiasco--less for any intrinsic reason than because, out of animosity toward Chaplin himself, superpatriotic organizations picketed, boycotted and wrote threatening letters to theater managers who were considering running it. Ultimately, United Artists withdrew the film from circulation. Finally, in September of 1952, after frequent clashes with the press and the Government that ranged from back taxes to alleged Communist leanings, Chaplin and his family left the United States to take up residence in Switzerland. He had always wanted to be, in his own words, "a citizen of the world." Looking back at his many marriages and the numerous scandals that checkered his career, one must agree that he was, at the very least, worldly.

• • •

Jerry Giesler could hardly complain for lack of cases during the Forties. Another leading male star who had need of his services in this period was the barrel-chested Robert Mitchum, who, in 1948, found himself faced with a Los Angeles grand jury indictment for possession of marijuana and conspiracy to possess marijuana. Mitchum, born in Connecticut in 1917, had attained filmland eminence with his portrayal of a tough Army captain in The Story of G.I. Joe (1945). Suddenly the big, sleepy-eyed actor, whose movie career had begun with bit parts in Hopalong Cassidy Westerns, was catapulted into such august company as Katharine Hepburn (Undercurrent) and Dorothy McGuire (Till the End of Time).RKO, capitalizing on his success, rushed him into one picture after another; two of these (as well as a third made for Republic) were still unreleased at the time of his arrest.

Mitchum, long married and the father of two boys, had gone to a "reefer party" in a cottage in Laurel Canyon, overlooking Hollywood, one night when his wife was out of town. According to Giesler, who charged that the whole thing was a frame-up, the actor had barely stepped in the door and accepted his first reefer when the detectives staged their raid. Giesler also declared that the room had been bugged and the press tipped off in advance that the raid was to take place. In any case, Mitchum and three others--including a dancer and a 20-year-old actress--were all booked on suspicion of violating state and Federal laws. His studio, anxious to avoid losing Mitchum's sizable teenage following, immediately contacted Giesler; and the lawyer's able defense--he never permitted the actor to plead guilty or not guilty, either of which would have led to a jury trial and attendant publicity--resulted in a mild sentence of 60 days in the county jail. Mitchum served only 50, let off for "good behavior." The public proved understanding; some thought along with Giesler, that he was the victim of a frame-up, others that his self-confessed "addiction" represented illness rather than criminal behavior. His popularity has remained undimmed through the following decades, despite a reputation for pugnacity that is not entirely unmerited. (He once, in a fit of pique, tossed a Warner Bros. flunky into San Francisco Bay.) But as Mitchum explained, "There are these guys who come after you at a bar because they equate you with the roles you play. I do my best to avoid incidents, but if they happen to get rough, I usually find I can be a little rougher." In other words, art imitates life to such an extent that eventually life, in self-defense, is forced to imitate art.

• • •

Muscular Mitchum was only one of a number of wartime leading men elevated to stardom less for their acting abilities than for their physical prowess. They didn't have to move a muscle in their well-developed biceps and torsos from time to time. "The beefcake boys," they were called; and among them John Wayne was undisputed king--or at least "the Duke," the admiring and affectionate name that has clung to him throughout his lengthy Hollywood career. Wayne, born Marion Michael Morrison in Winterset, Iowa, in 1907, almost literally began at the top in movies. After a short term as an assistant property man for John Ford, he was recommended for--and got--the leading role in one of Fox' biggest films of 1931, Raoul Walsh's epic The Big Trail. Tall (6'4"), rugged (a former football player) and willing to take any risk demanded of him, the youthful Wayne knocked himself out to make a success of what he recognized as his big opportunity; but every close-up, every line of dialog betrayed his desperate inexperience. He more than made up for this during the Thirties, however, when he appeared as a Western stunt man, heavy and hero in, as he once put it, "more bad pictures than anyone who has survived in Hollywood." If he was noted for anything during this period, it was for his innovation of heaving heavy furniture at his opponents in countless movie brawls. Despite the fact that Wayne's sole reputation by the end of the Thirties was as a quickie cowboy, John Ford remembered his former assistant favorably and summoned him when he was casting the Ringo Kid role for his classic Western Stagecoach (1939). By this time, Wayne was ready. The film immediately brought him back to the top.

Wartime audiences, eager for he-man types, responded favorably to the broad-shouldered, slow-spoken, rather genial giant that Wayne represented--and Wayne, quick to perceive the elements entering into his new-found popularity, took pains to accentuate them. He even had the doorways on his sets built undersized, so that he always had to stoop making an entrance. John Ford's The Long Voyage Home, based on three of Eugene O'Neill's short plays about the sea, served to consolidate his position as an actor; and before long, like Errol Flynn, he was off winning the War single-handedly for us in such films as Flying Tigers, The Fighting Seabees, Back to Bataan and They Were Expendable. Alter the War, he also assumed partial responsibility for the famous flag-raising in The Sands of Iwo Jima. Ironically, an early football injury rendered him ineligible for active service in the real War.

Although Wayne likes to claim that he isn't much of an actor, actually he is a very good one in his somewhat limited way. He knows his range and generally manages to stay well within it. "I'm John Wayne," he once said, "and that's who the audience wants to see." An exhibitors' poll taken in 1950 proved him eminently right. John Wayne was voted number one, and he has remained among the top ten with amazing consistency ever since.

• • •

Another of the wartime "beefcake boys"--indeed, it was for him that the term was invented--was dark, curly-haired, curvy-lipped, grimacing Victor Mature, who for a short period represented the very epitome of male glamor. When Mature, playing a Hollywood film star, walked out on the stage in Moss Hart's Lady in the Dark dressed in gleaming-white polo togs, a character shrieked, "My dear, what a beautiful hunk of man!" The "beautiful hunk" appellation also clung to him. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1915, Mature developed an urge to act early in life and, making his way to Hollywood, appeared at the Pasadena Playhouse. Hal Roach saw him there and, after giving him a small role as a lovesick gangster in The Housekeeper's Daughter, confined his histrionics to prehistoric grunts in One Million B.C. (1940). But if Mature's acting abilities were largely concealed in the film, his manly torso was not. Indeed, it made such an impression on the girls that in virtually every one of his subsequent pictures, the producers took pains to provide suitable pretexts for exposing it all over again.

Rejected by a Hollywood draft board for Army service, Mature joined the Coast Guard; when he returned to the screen, critics noted that he was some-how no longer merely a pretty boy, that he had attained both a new dignity and distinct signs of acting ability. He was particularly impressive as the gangster-turned-stool-pigeon in Kiss of Death. His own kiss of death occurred soon after, when, cast as the most famous strong man of them all in Cecil B. De Mille's Samson and Delilah, he was called upon to have his dark curls trimmed by the seductive Hedy Lamarr and singlehandedly to topple over a vast pagan temple. From that time on, in films such as Androcles and the Lion, The Robe and The Egyptain, he found himself typed as the togaed hero of costume spectaculars. On the side, he acted as escort to a vast list of glamor girls in Hollywood and abroad, where in the mid-Fifties he found it convenient of settle.

• • •

More "beefcake," but this time in an economy-sized package, was presented by thin-lipped, poker-faced Alan Ladd, who enjoyed enormous popularity after his first important role, as Raven, the lethal, trench-coated gunman in This Gun for Hire (1942). There was no trace of compassion in this trigger-happy hood. When asked by a character in the picture how he feels after he has killed someone, Ladd replies, "I feel fine." With cold-blooded sadism elevated to an art in wartime Hollywood, the well-conditioned audiences promptly took Ladd to their hearts. But there was something more to Alan Ladd than sheer violence. There was also in his almost expressionless face the suggestion of a sensitivity that women especially responded to; they wanted to save him from himself, to protect him from the consequences of his own ruthlessness. The New Yorker, after This Gun for Hire, prophesied that Ladd would start a whole new vogue. He did--for himself.

Small (5'6"), baby-faced, with bleached hair over dark eyebrows and vivid green eyes, Ladd deadpanned his way through The Glass Key and China, in which for the first time he removed his shirt and revealed a small but well-muscled torso. From that time on, in the more than 40 films in which he appeared until his death in 1964, the shirt-removal bit became the scéne obligatoire of nearly all Ladd pictures.

But Ladd's star had begun to fade almost as soon as it was pinned on his chest. It was resuscitated briefly by The Blue Dahlia, an above-average Raymond Chandler thriller, but after that it was downhill again, with his miscasting in the title role of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby being of no help at all. There was still one more great role for him, however, as it turned out. George Stevens, one of Hollywood's finest directors, cast him as Shane in a picture that remains a classic Western. On the strength of that film alone, Ladd's name must resound in cinema history. No one could deny the sheer beauty, the screen poetry of those scenes in which Ladd, clad in white buckskin, rode out of nowhere onto the VistaVision screen to shoot it out with Jack Palance, the most evil gun fighter of all time, and then rode off again into nowhere. "Shane, Shane--come back!" a small boy cries, but Shane had ridden off into the mythos of the West, where he belonged. As for Alan Ladd Shane was his last good part. Stevens wanted to use him again, as Jett Rink (the James Dean role) in Giant, but his wife advised against it; and as he stumbled from one mediocrity to another, he gradually became knows as The Great Stoned Face; he had begun to turn to drink. Paradoxically, Stevens above all others understood the value of that face. "Give me an actor with one good expression," he once said, "and I'll be happy." Ladd had that, and little else--one good expression that managed to express everything and nothing.

• • •

For a brief time during the decade, volatile, hardheaded John Garfield also ranked high on the list of he-man heart-throbs. Despite the fact that he could obviously take care of himself, women instinctively felt that he needed mothering--no doubt because in so many of his pictures he played a child of the Depression sadly buffeted by a ruthless fate. In his eight years at Warner Bros., he starred in no less than 24 pictures, most of them designed to exploit his surly virility and bitter determination to make good at all costs. Probably his best film during the Forties was The Postman Always Rings Twice (made at MGM), in which he played the hobo hero lured by Lana Turner into murdering her husband; but given half a chance by the script, Garfield could always be relied upon to turn in a mettlesome performance. He proved it in Humoresque, written by Clifford odets, in which he played a talented violinist from the East Side taken in hand (and bed) by patroness Joan Crawford; and again as the embittered boxer who made it from rags to riches in Abraham Polansky's Body and Soul.

Garfield's own sympathies were undoubtedly leftist; and his convictions were at times a handicap to his career. He insisted on appearing in plays by leftist writers, much to Hollywood's disapproval, and contributed openly to various fellow-traveler causes--a course that led inevitably to a subpoena to appear in 1951 before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Although he abjured communism, Garfield refused to name names. His career in Hollywood seemed finished; the investigation also precipitated an estrangement from his wife, a childhood sweetheart whom he had married in 1934. In New York, he started dating others, among them the beautiful socialite actress Iris Whitney.

On May 21, 1952, he died of a heart attack in her bed. He was not yet 40. Quite apart from his talents, which were considerable, John Garfield held a special significance on the American movie scene. He had once, with utter accuracy, referred to himself as "the Jean Gabin of the Bronx." What he meant was that he had broken through the Hollywood stereotype that male sex stars must be tall Anglo-Saxon Protestants with classic features and clean hands. Garfield, born Jules Garfinkle in New York's Lower East Side, was small, proletarian and Jewish. He deserves credit for helping end one form of Hollywood discrimination.

• • •

If a tough Jewish boy from the East Side could make good in Hollywood, why not the skinny Italian son of a Hoboken fireman? When Frank Sinatra was tapped by the movies in 1943, he weighed only 138 pounds, his ears were too large, his neck was scarred and he looked, as he himself, put it, "hungry." Altogether, he was the least likely candidate for stardom since Vera Hruba Ralston. What he did have in his favor, though, was his voice--The Voice, as his legions of hysterical teenaged admirers insisted. Such was their adulation that he survived early disasters such as Higher and Higher (1943) and Step Lively (1944), in part because the screaming and swooning that had accompanied his every stage appearance were assiduously encouraged by Sinatra's press agents when he transferred his talents to the screen. Born in 1916, Francis Albert Sinatra was just this side of being a juvenile delinquent when, in 1933, he happened to hear Bing Crosby sing in a Jersey City vaudeville house and suddenly discovered a purpose in life. Sinatra decided to emulate him. He sand one-nighters in small clubs, appeared with the Major Bowes amateur hour, toured with one of the Major's amateur shows, eventually graduated to the Harry James band and then to Tommy Dorsey's. In less than ten years, Sinatra had made it to the big time. His first solo engagement, at New York's vast Paramount Theater, broke all house records. Teenagers rioted in the aisles and Times Square traffic was disrupted as thousands more jammed the streets seeking admission. Thereupon, RKO promptly grabbed the little fellow and launched him on a film career.

Sinatra's screen personality acquired stature when, in 1945, he moved to MGM and appeared in that studio's series of star-studded musicals, often in tandem with Gene Kelly: Anchors Aweigh, It Happened in Brooklyn and On the Town. The new Sinatra--self-amused, self-assured--began to emerge, replacing the gangling. boyish swooner-crooner. What also began to emerge were many unsavory rumors about his satyristic off-screen impulses, including the story that he had tacked onto the door of his MGM dressing room a list of its top female stars, then ticked off their names as he enjoyed their favors. Although still married to his first wife, Nancy, he was linked romantically with, among others, glamor girls Marilyn Maxwell and Ava Gardner (whom he married in 1951). Perhaps it was this sudden change of image that contributed to his precipitous decline in popularity late in the Forties. During the War years, his appeal had been to the maternal instincts of his young admirers; the post-War Sinatra obviously did not need mothering. Or perhaps it was merely a string of second-rate pictures. At any rate, as the Forties were ending, it began to look as if Sinatra's career were ending as well. His record sales had slumped, his golden throat was hemorrhaging, the adulation of his fans had declined and, to cap it off, MGM abruptly dropped his contract. Few would have foreseen that within ten years, Frank Sinatra would fight his way back to become the biggest personality in show business.

• • •

If the War proved an undisguised boon for actors of short stature--men such as Ladd, Garfield and Sinatra--it was an even greater boon for any tall, good-looking leading man who somehow escaped the Armed Forces. Most of the established male stars--Clark Gable, James Stewart, Robert Montgomery, Robert Taylor--had gone off to war, not to return for the duration. With movie attendance zooming to almost 90,000,000 a week, there was an unprecedented opportunity for a talented newcomer to win quick favor and establish himself in the Hollywood firmament. Of the lot, none established himself more quickly or firmly than durable, dependable Gregory Peck. His manliness, his earnestness, his shy sincerity were all in evidence when he made his screen debut in Days of Glory (1943), an otherwise undistinguished film about guerrilla warfare on the Russian front; and even more so when David O. Selznick cast him as the self-doubting priest in Keys of the Kingdom, a handsomely produced picture that won him an Academy Award nomination. His position as a top star was soon consolidated through films such as Spellbound, Duel in the Sun, Gentlemen's Agreement and Twelve O'Clock High. Hollywood was sure that it had clasped to its bosom an actor of the first magnitude; the critical confraternity, while less certain of his Thespian talents, was willing to concede, in the words of James Agee, "his unusual handsomeness, and his still more unusual ability to communicate sincerity."

Although other critics tended to feel that his conscious underplaying in numerous subsequent screen appearances was rather wooden, and male members of the audiences regarded him as dull, women found his masculine, dependable, honest as the sun, trustworthy, sensitive, intelligent and, in a word, appealing. His aura of intellectuality, particularly, captured vast sections of the female ticket buyers of the post-War years. Pauline Kael, on the other hand, rather acidly averred, "Gregory Peck is not an actor at all; he is a model, and the model has become the American ideal." Married to former French journalist Veronique Passani, and the father of two children, Peck has managed to keep clear of Hollywood's scandalmongers--despite a previous divorce. In recent years, he has become Hollywood's most dignified emissary whenever dignity is called for--as in his recent appointment to Lyndon Johnson's National Council on the Arts.

Actually, in retrospect, one can see that the Forties--or, more specifically, the War--marked an important transition in male hero figures. Where during the Thirties the dazzling good looks of a Robert Taylor, Tyrone Power or Don Ameche could be parlayed into a passport to the pantheon, the emerging stars of the late Forties were such virile, athletic, noncollar-ad types as Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster. Even the relatively handsome young men like William Holden, Mark Stevens and Dana Andrews found it advisable to rough up their image a bit once the War was over and Bogart reigned supreme. Wholly symptomatic was Dick Powell, the fresh-faced crooner of innumerable Warner musicals during the Thirties; he gained a new lease on life when, in 1945, he donned slouch hat and trench coat, turned private eye and began to get beaten up regularly by Raymond Chandler--like hoods. Time also took its toll. Tyrone Power, James Stewart, Robert Taylor and other top stars of the Thirties, as we've noted, went into the Service as relatively youthful striplings; by the time they returned to the studios, the marks of maturity were already upon them. As it happened, this proved an advantage in most instances. Bogart and beefcake--the dominant maleness of John Wayne, the arrogant self-sufficiency of Alan Ladd and John Garfield--these had become the new post-War sex symbols. No doubt many of Hollywood's veterans resumed their careers with a sigh of relief. At least they didn't have to play juvenile clothes horses anymore.

• • •

During the Forties, Americans began to see a great many films from England, and not merely on the art-house circuit. This is not too surprising, since Britain was our ally; her courage and fortitude under fire generated a wide and spontaneous interest in her people and their way of life. But somehow, as American critics were quick to note, the coming of war had spurred a marked improvement in British films. As well mounted as our own, they often seemed more realistic, more intelligent, more mature and far better acted. And where, during the Thirties, it seemed as if England had only two leading men, John Loder and George Arliss, suddenly its cinema fairly bristled with a new tribe of singularly attractive males--Rex Harrison, James Mason, Michael Redgrave, Michael Wilding, John Mills and Stewart Granger among them--many of whom were destined to make the trek to Hollywood. On the distaff side, where formerly there had been only Margaret Lockwood and Jessie Matthews, now we began to see such newcomers as the youthful, shining-eyed Jean Simmons, the kittenish Joan Greenwood, svelte Valerie Hobson, sexy Patricia Roc and the delectably feminine Wendy Hiller. Critics spoke approvingly of pock-faced Trevor Howard and drab, housewifely Celia Johnson, the middle-aged co-stars of Brief Encounter--perhaps because they provided a welcome relief from tinselly, saccharine pairings such as Van Johnson and June Allyson, which then dominated America's romantic films. Even English accents, long anathema at the American box office, began to be not only accepted but cherished. They had class.

Not that the British accent was totally foreign to our screen. During the Thirties, the cultivated voices of Leslie Howard, Ronald Colman and Laurence Olivier enhanced many a romantic role; while gruff C. Aubrey Smith had become Hollywood's favorite embodiment of the Empire and its "thin red line." Olivier, particularly, scored strongly as the moody, love-stricken Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights and as the gloomy proprietor of stately Manderley in Hitchcock's Rebecca just at the turn of the decade. But he, like many another member of Hollywood's "British colony," so cleverly satirized by Evelyn Waugh in The Loved One, responded to his nation's call when war broke out. With his beautiful wife, Vivien Leigh, fresh from her triumph in Gone with the Wind, he returned to England to play opposite her in the patriotically inspired That Hamilton Woman, a heavily romanticized tribute to Lord Nelson. For the rest of the Forties, he alternated busily between stage and screen, adding to his already impressive collection of laurels with his two Shakespeare films, Henry V and Hamlet, which he not only starred in but also produced and directed. Both contributed greatly to the mounting prestige of the British cinema on the international scene. When Olivier returned to the United States in 1946, it was as a member of the venerable Old Vic Company, which, with Ralph Richardson, he had helped revitalize during the War.

James Mason was also a leading man in British plays and films; before emigrating to Hollywood toward the end of the Forties, he helped restore a favorable trade balance for the British film industry through his intense performances as a sadistic villain in The Man in Grey, the crippled musician in The Seventh Veil, the wounded terrorist in Odd Man Out, and many more. Curiously, with his mellifluous voice and haunted eyes, he could make the most scabrous character seem sympathetic, even romantic. Hollywood, understandably, chose to emphasize the more romantic aspects of his nature in films such as Pandora and the Flying Dutchman and The Story of Three Loves; but from the early Fifties, he asserted his preference for meatier, more meaningful acting roles than generally befall a handsome leading man. For one thing, his concentration on character parts, such as Rommel in The Desert Fox and the ill-fated Norman Maine in A Star Is Born, has undoubtedly prolonged his career. (He made his stage debut in 1931, has been in films since 1935.) But no less important, Mason has always maintained that only character roles provide him with the challenge and stimulation he requires.

No such lofty thoughts, in all probability, ever entered Stewart Granger's tousled head. The darkly handsome young actor, invalided out of the Black Watch early in World War Two, was immediately in demand for romantic leads on stage and screen; but his career zoomed into orbit when he played Phyllis Calvert's lover in the costume melodrama The Man in Grey (1943). From that time on, he was rarely out of costume. Turning out in quick succession such films as Fanny by Gaslight, Caesar and Cleopatra and Saraband, he was soon being referred to as "the British Robert Taylor." Although MGM already had the American Robert Taylor under contract, as the Forties were ending that studio brought him to the United States for the eminently successful King Solomon's Mines (1950) and such glittering remakes as Scaramouche, The Prisoner of Zenda and Beau Brummell. From 1945 to 1949, Granger topped the list of British stars in box-office popularity, and for a time it looked as if he might attain a similar rating in this country as well; but as the vogue for swashbuckling melodramas declined, so did his career.

At the peak of his glory, Granger often appeared in films opposite either Margaret Lockwood or Patricia Roc, Britain's two most popular leading ladies during the Forties. (These were the girls, it will be remembered, who helped spark the battle of the cleavage commented upon in Part X, War and Peace in Europe, Playboy, September 1966.) The two eventually came face to face--or, more precisely, bust to bust--in The Wicked Lady (1945), in which each revealed equal amounts of décolletage. This was achieved by cleverly constructed bodices that squeezed the breasts so tightly together that a deep and intriguing cleft appeared between them. Unfortunately for American viewers, the British producers, under attack from American distributors and Code authorities, reshot the bodice sequences with the offending cleavages daintily veiled with lace.

• • •

In France, film production was badly hit by the War and its aftermath and, as a result, few new sex stars were developed--a dearth that was generously rectified in the subsequent decade. Meanwhile, however, the greatest French star of the Thirties, Jean Gabin, had made his way to Hollywood to escape the German Occupation. He was placed under contract by 20th Century-Fox, but that studio had little idea of what to do with him. After several false starts. he completed two pictures, Moontide (1942) and The Impostor (released in 1944), a melodrama about the Free French forces in North Africa. But both he and Hollywood knew that they were not meant for each other; in June 1943, he sailed for Algiers, joined the Free French, won the Croix de Guerre and the Medaille Militaire for his part in the fight against Germany, marched in the victory parade in Paris in August 1944, and resumed his professional career--with Dietrich in Martin Roumagnac (The Room Upstairs). "If I had stayed in the United States when everyone else was fighting a war," he once said, "I could never have set foot in France again." It took a while for his public to adjust to an older, heavier, craggier hero than they had remembered from the Thirties: but by the early Fifties, he had discovered for himself yet another image--the old pro, the likable has-been, the man no longer touched by emotional involvements. Although he is now well into his 60s, it is still working form him.

With the liberation of France. American audiences began to see some of the films that had been stockpiled by the Occupation, and to meet again some of their favorites from the late Thirties. There was Pierre Blanchar, whose burning eyes and fierce intellectuality wrung female hearts in Crime and Punishment and Un Carnet de Bal. Handsome Pierre Fresnay, the youthful hero of Pagnol's Marius trilogy, was back as well: but in the meantime, he had matured into a superb character actor and was no longer likely to become anybody's dreamboat. Jean-Pierre Aumont and Charles Boyer had long since departed for Hollywood, of course: and Louis Jourdan, whose first French film was Le Corsaire (1939), joined them there soon after the War had ended. During the War years, the only other male lead of any distinction to emerge was the coldly handsome, blondly Aryan Jean Marais, whose appeal was limited. French critics frankly deplored the absence of eligible young leading men in their cinema. But soon after the War, this was offset by the appearance of the sensitive, poetic, sadly short-lived Gérard Philipe and by the equally poetic, and possibly even more sensitive mime, Jean-Louis Barrault. Unfortunately, both were such consummate artists that it was difficult for the general public to think of them as sex symbols.

On the other hand, American audiences did take to pretty, piquant Micheline Presle as De Maupassant's patriotic prostitute in Boule de Suif and, in Devil in the Flesh, as the married seductress of an inexperienced boy. Michèle Morgan, who had spent the War years in Hollywood, returned to France for Symphonie Pastorale, in which, once more, she represented feminine innocence combined with physical allure. Vivacious Danielle Darrieux, whose performance in Mayerling brought her to Hollywood in the late Thirties, returned to France during the War years and later appeared in many films, among them the witty Occupe-Toi d'Amelie and La Ronde--but the suspicion of collaborationism hung ever over her lovely head. Most fascinating of all by far was the stately Arletty, who, by the Forties, was distinctly middle-aged but, as they say, hardly looked it. No one who saw her chef-d'oeuvre, as Garance in Children of Paradise, would have guessed that the role was played by a woman of some 45 years. For many American sophisticates, Arletty came to represent the quintessence of the mature, agreeably sex-conscious European woman who demanded little and accepted much, as long as it was pleasurable to her. Some of this entrancing quality managed to rub off on a later French star, Jeanne Moreau.

Far less beautiful, but more magnetic to American audiences, was Italy's Anna Magnani, who, in one burst of creative vitality, established an entirely new acting style in Italy just as the War ended. Although her role was not large in Roberto Rossellini's Open City, in which she played the mistress of a Resistance leader, she was so persuasive, natural and, above all, earthy that it seemed the camera was discovering something out of real life rather than photographing a performance. She had the coarse dark hair of a washerwoman; her upper lip was shadowed by a slight fuzz; her armpits were unshaven, her teeth irregular. In the film she meets her end running after a truck carrying her lover to prison; a German officer gives an order and she is shot down before the shocked eyes of her neighbors. She falls gracelessly, her dress disarranged and her white thighs exposed--a literal rendering of the kind of atrocity photograph then so current. And yet she fascinated. Overnight, as Time put it, "the narrow highways and byways of Italy were crowded with 'Magnanini,' who frumped their hair down over their eyes, ripped a few strategic seams in their cheap cotton prints, and generally made a sensual virtue of post-War economic necessity." The style was called neorealismo.

Who was Magnani? She was by no means one of the many amateurs who jostled their way into the Italian neorealist film movement, but a talented actress who had worked in Mussolini's film industry since the mid-Thirties and had also achieved some reputation as a Chanteuse in Rome's less-fancy night clubs. Born in Egypt of Italian parents in 1909, she attended a dramatic school when she was 17, then joined a rundown road show as a singer. Her first film appearance was in the title role of The Blind Woman of Sorrento (1934). Shortly thereafter, she married film director Goffredo Alessandrini, made a few films with him and began to display the volcanic propensities for which she has since been noted. When she discovered her husband enjoying a clandestine rendezvous with another woman, she evidenced her displeasure by ramming his car with hers. Soon after the two vehicles were separated, the two principals in the crash separated as well. For several years--until Ingrid Bergman appeared on the scene--Magnani was Rossellini's mistress, although the relationship was never one that might be called stable. It was not uncommon for them to toss crockery at each other in public, and their exchanges of fine Italianate curses became legendary. "I had to become an actress," she once said. "Otherwise, I think I would have become a great criminal."

Her final film with Rossellini was The Miracle, which, although produced in 1948, was not widely shown in this country until 1952. In it, Magnani was seen as a simple-minded peasant girl who believes that she has been impregnated by St. Joseph, for whom she has mistaken a passing stranger (played by a slender Federico Fellini). Mocked cruelly by her fellow villagers, she gives birth to her child alone and unassisted. The film ends as the girl opens her blouse to nurse her baby. In an unforgettable last close-up, Magnani's face is seen wearing an expression of beatific pride, a common woman transfigured into a Madonna. Although hailed in Italy, the film deeply offended Catholic sensibilities in this country, and it took a Supreme Court decision to get the film into release.

A new era had begun. A decade that had opened with Betty Grable ended with Anna Magnani. Legs were being replaced by bosoms, escapist romance by neorealistic earthiness. During the Fifties, the sex stars--an increasingly international throng--were to flourish as never before, to expose themselves more freely and to cast off the repressions of outmoded moralities. And the film industries both here and abroad hastened to bid them welcome and to utilize their talents and their physical attributes to the fullest. For the television antennas were darkening the landscape, and something was desperately needed to lure the public out of its living rooms. Cinerama and CinemaScope, 3-D and stereophonic sound were all tried, but somehow none succeeded quite so well as such glorious new goddesses as Brigitte Bardot, Sophia Loren and--most fascinating of them all--the tragic Marilyn Monroe.

In their next installment of "The History of Sex in Cinema," authors Knight and Alpert examine the cataclysmic impact of television on the American screen, the maturing of movie content and the waning power of the Code in the wake of pivotal Supreme Court decisions on film censorship.